Bill Moyers: We Should Be Protesting, Too
And this why the GOP has made "divide and conquer" a priority -- so we would not unite and rise up.
http://billmoyers.com/2014/10/04/protesting/
This week, tens of thousands of Hong Kong residents turned out to protest China’s plan for bringing democracy to that city. Rather than letting voters pick the candidates that get to run for chief executive, Beijing wants the candidates selected by a 1,200 person “nominating committee.” Critics charge the committee will be “dominated by a pro-Beijing business and political elite.” “We want genuine universal suffrage,” Martin Lee, founding chairman of Hong Kong’s Democratic Party demanded, “not democracy with Chinese characteristics.”
...
Today there’s no “white primary.” Today, there’s a “green primary.” To run in any election, primary or general, candidates must raise extraordinary sums, privately. Yet they raise that money not from all of us. They raise it from a tiny, tiny few. In the last non-presidential election, only about .05 percent of America gave the maximum contribution to even one congressional candidate in either the primary or general election; .01 percent gave $10,000 or more; and in 2012, 132 Americans gave 60 percent of the superPAC money spent. This is the biased filter in the first stage of our American democracy.
...
America’s government is demonstrably responsive to the “economic elite and organized business interests,” Gilens and Page found, while “the preferences of the average American appear to have only a minuscule, near-zero, statistically non-significant impact upon public policy.” Boss Tweed would have been impressed.
The “green primary” isn’t a formal bar to election. But it is certainly an effective bar. There isn’t a single political analyst in America today who doesn’t look first to whether a candidate for Congress has the necessary financial support of the relevant funders. That money isn’t enough, and it certainly doesn’t guarantee victory. (Only 94 percent of candidates with more money win.) But no candidate ignores the money, or is ignorant of the views of the tiny fraction of the 1 percent that provides it. That’s not perfect control, but it turns out to be control enough to weaken the ability of ordinary Americans to have something other than a “non-significant impact upon public policy.”
