Tag: activism

Going after the gas companies

Legislation that would cut aid to oil companies appears dead, thanks to a coalition of Republicans and oil state Democrats. A minority of Senators, in fact, have scuttled legislation that would end subsidies for the most profitable industry in the United States.

The lessons from this?

  • Big oil — and big business in general — has far more power than voters and consumers, thanks in part to the industry’s ability to spend massive amounts of money on political campaigns and buy candidates’ loyalty.
  • The Senate system is undemocratic, both because it gives as much power to small states with little population as it does to larger states, and because it allows the filibuster and secret holds.
  • We need a massive realignment of our politics that shifts power back to the citizenry — reform of the campaign finance system, constitutional checks on corporations, reconfiguration of the Senate, an end to the electoral college and to the two-party system.

The most important lesson, however, is that we cannot wait for government to fix things. Our elected representatives only react to threats to their jobs so we have to organize (civil disobedience and lobbying) and run aggressive primary and third-party campaigns designed to do what the Tea Party has done to the Republicans — pull the Democrats to the left.

  • Send me an e-mail.
  • Read poetry at The Subterranean.
  • Certainties and Uncertainties a chapbook by Hank Kalet, will be published in November by Finishing Line Press. It can be ordered here.
  • Suburban Pastoral, a chapbook by Hank Kalet, available here.
Email me at grassroots at comcast dot net.

Coffee time — but please make it strong

I just finished a column on a group that has dubbed itself the Coffee Party Movement, a nominally liberal answer to the Tea Partiers. My argument is that the group is useful, but lacks depth.

It reclaims government as a potentially positive influence on society and restates what should be obvious, that government “is not the enemy of the people, but the expression of our collective will, and that we must participate in the democratic process in order to address the challenges that we face as Americans.”

The problem is its apparently content-free agenda and the bloodless commitment to cooperation and efficiency that has stalled the Obama agenda and left progressives standing on the sidelines.

Its founder, Annabel Park, told The New York Times that the group would offer “a different model of civic participation” and hoped to “send a message to people in Washington that you have to learn how to work together, you have to learn how to talk about these issues without acting like you’re in an ultimate fighting session.”

It blames Washington gridlock on “the proliferation of partisanship,” an argument that ignores much of what actually happens in the nation’s capital and underplays the need for elected officials to take principled stands on issue.

What good is it, after all, if the U.S. Senate works together when the result is hundreds of thousands of American troops on foreign soil fighting in unnecessary and counterproductive wars? What good is it if elected officials work together, if it results in the dismantling of welfare, or the expansion of the national security state?

Email me at grassroots at comcast dot net.