After the election

We've just finished running an experiment to see whether big money can hire an election to shape the future of the United States to its liking.  It's not the first time this experiment has been run, but I'll bet it was one of the most successful.

What I don't get is how people can be convinced to campaign against their own best interests.  We've seen it here in New Hampshire for decades - the landed poor raising the loudest protests against a "broad based" tax - the best would be an income tax - that would get them out from under the onerous burden of the property tax that has turned even reasonable people against their school boards and allowed the wealthy to avoid paying their fair share.

And now, nationally.  The Tea Partiers, missing entirely their own point, electing people who will, now freed from the obligation of the campaign, vote against the interests of the common people (health care, financial reform, action on energy and global warming) in order to serve the moneyed interests that really got them elected.  In case this is not clear, they will work for the interests of people who do not need national health care because they can afford their own, the people who do not want financial reform because the way things are going is just fine with them, the people who don't want to spend their money on something as frivolous as adapting to sea-level rise (let alone preventing it) because they have enough money, thank you, to build their own sea walls.

Just watch how fast these supporters of Constitutional rights will go to work for the very people - organizations, really - who would subvert our rights to those of the corporations and lobbyists and interest groups organized and controlled by the rapacious rich - not all the rich, but the rapacious ones who will not settle for a share.

We've lost the franchise, in most respects.  What we have left is the right to assemble, the right to speak (Right along with the corporations!), the right to dissent - and the right to peaceably disobey.  I am going to be looking for these opportunities and for the organizations, groups, people and occasions that afford them.   I hope we will succeed.

But we have to act fast.  Three years from now, if we do not, there will be a new commander-in-chief in the White House - one who will be much more likely to use the unlimited force of what has become of our government against us.