After a seemingly endless barrage of election campaign garbage from the media (and. of course, the recorded messages on the telephone and the flyers in your mailbox) the election is over. What have we learned from the results? At least two things:
- Given enough money, corporations and millionaires can buy an election. See http://www.opensecrets.org/news/2010/11/whos-buying-this-election.html for one analysis. Others are readily available on the net.
- Thanks to well-funded tea party initiatives, racism is out of the closet and into the mainstream. Repeal the Civil rights Act of 1963? - It's on the TP agenda. Require "ID on demand" a la the Arizona anti-immigration law? - Yep. A demand for racial and ethnic purity is just around the corner.
There are ways to fight this kind of ignorance:
- Push for the adoption of a 28th amendment to the Constitution to overturn the Supreme Court decision to allow corporations to give unlimited amounts of money to political campaigns. See http://www.freespeechforpeople.org/amendment for details.
- Support other efforts to bring corporations to heel, such as the Social and Environmental Responsibility Amendment.
- Encourage the Democratic Party to be more aggressive in combating this kind of nonsense.
On the local scene, we have an example of money apparently having its way in the re-election of a county councilman. In spite of the fact that this councilman has publicly stated that human-induced climate change is not proven and that "today's best available science is tomorrow's junk science," he received the backing of community business leaders, a blitz of campaign signs, ads and phone calls and the endorsement of a local newspaper. Money buys election in San Juan County, too.
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