Monday, October 17, 2011

200,000 Signatures on Get the Money Out!!

Wow, 200,000 on the campaign to Get Money Out of Politics.  In this piece Mr. Ratigan makes the case for a constitutional amendment and how those amendments have been passed in the past.  Unless, we can impeach Clarence Thomas and/or get a "retroactive recusal" on Citizens United; we are left with only the Constitutional Amendment to Get the Money Out of Politics.

Constitutional Moments: The People's Voice

Today we face a crushing burden of foreclosures, dropping incomes, and a financial elite that has bought our government.  The elite consensus is powerful enough to prevent change, no matter who is elected.  The situation seems, at least in electoral terms, hopeless.  Yet, America has been here before, and has shown remarkable resilience in the darkest of times.
So just how do we get the debate we deserve?  How do we root out the corruption, greed, and fraud in our system?  Clearly, the root of much evil in our system of government comes from the financing of political campaigns by powerful interests.  And the Supreme Court has said that money is speech, and thus, protected by the Constitution.  So we must pass a Constitutional amendment to speak back to the Supreme Court, and assert the primacy of government by the people.
But how do we do this?  How does one pass a Constitutional amendment in the American system to ban money from politics?  It's not a question with an obvious answer, but history has some clues.  There have been only twenty seven amendments to the Constitution in over two hundred years of history, ten of which were ratified with the Constitution itself and several of which were procedural in nature.  Yet, the basic path to serious Constitutional change is almost always the same - it requires organizational focus by a dedicated small group, a willingness to build alliances across factional and regional lines, a belief in playing hardball, and a strong and sustained outcry by a large group of citizens.  Often, it is accompanied by local, state, and Federal laws that move the legal system in the direction of the amendment for many years before the Constitutional question emerges.  Sometimes it is accompanied by sympathetic court cases. 
Read the rest here & Sign the Petition Here
 Official portrait of Supreme Court Justice Cla...Image via Wikipedia
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