The two biggest movements in America that give me hope right now are the Occupy Movement and the effort to amend the U.S. Constitution to overturn the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision, you know, the one that says corporations are persons and can spend mountains of money to crush political candidates or anoint others.
Occupy will have another big day on May 1, when many protests are planned. I love its grassroots, ultra-democratic form. And its slogan, “We are the 99%,” and its demands for economic democracy are the most frontal assaults on the rigged class system since the 1930s or 1940s.
Amending the Constitution also holds great promise. The Citizens United decision is vastly unpopular, even among Republicans. And people in city after city, state after state, are going on record in favor of knocking corporate personhood off its perch.
On Thursday, Vermont became the third state in the union to call on Congress to pass a Constitutional Amendment declaring that “money is not speech, and corporations are not persons.”
Check out the margin of victory. The vote in the Vermont House was 92-40. Last week in the Vermont Senate it was 26-3.
Vermont now joins Hawaii and New Mexico in this call to Congress to establish a real democracy in this country.
We progressives must press every state legislature to fall in line.
You can find out more about these efforts from two groups that are doing some of the heavy lifting: Public Citizen and Move to Amend.
Let’s all lift with them, and with Occupy, and we’ll wrestle corporate power to the mat.
If you liked this story by Matthew Rothschild, the editor of The Progressive magazine, check out his story “Stop Obama’s Drone War in Pakistan."
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