Actually, we are at a crossroad right now but I don't think you understand what the choices are.
Either We the People come first or the Corporations come first.
If the corporations come first, bye bye middle class. We already see how much it shrunk under Bush.
We have 60 votes in the Senate, a majority in the House and we have the White House, plus we have 72% approval/mandate from the American people. It will never get any better than this.
Just watch and see how much power the corporations have even though we control the entire government.
Stop your bs that the dems are socialists. They serve the corporations too.
It's not just Bush or Clinton, or Reagan or Eisenhower who were under the influence of business. In fact, some of the smartest men around always thought the two went hand-in-glove. To change things around, that business is always 'evil' is a recipe for disaster:
International variation in the business-government interface: institutional and organizational considerations. (01-JAN-95) Academy of Management Review
International variation in the business-government interface: institutional and organizational considerations.
Publication: Academy of Management Review
Publication Date: 01-JAN-95
Author: Hillman, Amy ; Keim, Gerald
Scholars and practitioners from Adam Smith and Alexander Hamilton to Lester Thurow and Robert Reich have been concerned with the impact of government policies on business activities and, simultaneously, with the efforts by businesses to influence government policies. Alleged benefits of the consultative interaction of business and government in select European and Asian economies and the debate about explicit expansion of industrial policies in the United States are current examples underscoring the public policy significance of the relationship between business and government. From a managerial perspective, government policies and business efforts to affect government policy decisions can have a profound impact on the success of business endeavors (Keim & Baysinger, 1988; Marcus, Kaufman, & Beam, 1987; Mitnick, 1993; Weidenbaum, 1980; Yoffie & Bergenstein, 1985). From the perspective of nations, some scholars contend that the business and government interface can have a substantial impact on the rate of economic growth, the composition of such growth, and the allocation of the benefits and costs of economic growth within countries (Reich, 1991; Thurow, 1992; Wilson, 1990).
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Are you saying it would be a mistake to try and change the fact that the rich run/own/control this country and our politicians?
Some of us understand seperation of church and state but they don't understand seperation of state and corporations.
Along with the answer to this question, we may also find the answer to another question historians have asked for two centuries: Why was the Constitutional Convention held in secret behind locked doors, and why did James Madison not publish his own notes of the Convention until 1840, just after the last of the other participants had died?
The reason, simply put, was that most of the wealthy men among the delegates were betraying the interests of their own economic class. They were voting for democracy instead of oligarchy.
As with any political body, a few of the delegates, "a dozen at the outside" according to McDonald, "clearly acted according to the dictates of their personal economic interests."
But there were larger issues at stake. The people who hammered out the Constitution had such a strong feeling of history and destiny that it at times overwhelmed them.
They realized that in the seven-thousand-year history of what they called civilization, only once before, in Athens - and then only for the brief flicker of a few centuries - had anything like a democracy ever been brought into existence and survived more than a generation.
Their writings show that they truly believed they were doing sacred work, something greater than themselves, their personal interests, or even the narrow interests of their wealthy constituents back in their home states.
They believed they were altering the course of world history, and that if they got it right we could truly create a better world.
Thus the secrecy, the locked doors, the intensity of the Constitutional Convention. And thus the willingness to set aside economic interest to produce a document - admittedly imperfect - that would establish an enduring beacon of liberty for the world.
As George Washington, who presided over the Constitutional Convention, wrote to the nation on September 17, 1787 when "transmitting the Constitution" to the people of the new nation: "In all our deliberations on this subject we kept steadily in our view, that which appears to us the greatest interest of every true American, the consolidation of our Union, in which is involved our prosperity, felicity, safety, perhaps our national existence."
He concluded with his "most ardent wish" was that the Constitution "may promote the lasting welfare of that country so dear to us all, and secure her freedom and happiness..."
Since the so-called "Reagan revolution" more than cut in half the income taxes the multimillionaires and billionaires among us pay, wealth has concentrated in America in ways not seen since the era of the Robber Barons, or, before that, pre-revolutionary colonial times. At the same time, poverty has exploded and the middle class is under economic siege.
And now come the oligarchs - the most wealthy and powerful families of America - lobbying Congress that they should retain their stupefying levels of wealth and the power it brings, generation after generation. They say that democracy doesn't require a strong middle class, and that Jefferson was wrong when he said that "overgrown wealth" could be "dangerous to the State." They say that a permanent, hereditary, aristocratically rich ruling class is actually a good thing for the stability of society.
How Rich is Too Rich For Democracy?
