Our Government Has Been Hijacked! The Occupy movement is here to take it back.

Emmanuel Goldstein

The Problem: Our political system is broken because corporations are allowed to use their wealth to buy political influence.

Most Americans believe that everyone should have the same amount of say in government, regardless of how much money they have. But that is not the current state of things in the United States.

Corporations spend millions of dollars every year on political campaigns. Why do they do that? What’s their bottom line? What do they stand to gain?

If your answer is “political influence,” then ask yourself, can YOU afford to spend millions of dollars on campaign contributions? If not, then corporations are buying more political influence than you can and are stealing your right to be represented in government.

What does that have to do with the Occupy movement? On September 27, 2011, the people of Occupy Wall Street worked together to write a Declaration of the Occupation. This is the preamble:

As one people, united, we acknowledge the reality: that the future of the human race requires the cooperation of its members; that our system must protect our rights, and upon corruption of that system, it is up to the individuals to protect their own rights, and those of their neighbors; that a democratic government derives its just power from the people, but corporations do not seek consent to extract wealth from the people and the Earth; and that no true democracy is attainable when the process is determined by economic power. We come to you at a time when corporations, which place profit over people, self-interest over justice, and oppression over equality, run our governments. We have peaceably assembled here, as is our right, to let these facts be known.

This is the founding document of the Occupy movement. It says that our democracy cannot function because corporations are allowed to use their economic power to buy political influence and control our government. THAT is the key complaint of the Occupy movement. All of the other complaints coming out of the Occupy movement are CAUSED by that key problem. The other complaints are like branches, but the trunk of the tree is corporate influence on elections. Think about that. If we want to fix the myriad of problems, we could snip at each individual branch, or we could go for the trunk and solve all the problems at once. We need to go for the trunk. We need to take away corporations’ ability to hijack our government through campaign contributions.

A few points to consider:

·         Our political system is dysfunctional because corporations are able to use their wealth to fund political campaigns and hire lobbyists.

·         This undue influence that corporations have on our government makes everyone else’s influence less.

·         We the people do not govern ourselves; instead, we are governed by corporations and the extremely wealthy who run them.

·         Our government is not a government of, for, and by the people, but of, for, and by the extremely wealthy.

·         We are not opposed to capitalism; we are opposed to the unregulated capitalism that crashed our economy.

·         We do not seek a redistribution of wealth, but a redistribution of political power, so that every individual has the same amount of power, and no individuals can buy additional power.

·         We do not seek to unbalance the distribution of political power, but to balance it.

·         The richest 1% of people have way more than 1% of the power in this country. This is not fair. The richest 1% should have only 1% of the influence on our government. The other 99% of influence should belong to the other 99% of the population.

·         Corporations are in power now, and they are not going to give up that power willingly.

Who runs our government? Let’s take a look at how bad the situation really is. Here are the statistics on major campaign donors for the 2008 election. Notice that it is not just Republicans who are being bought off by big corporations. It is both parties.

Campaign donations by big banks:

Campaign donations by weapons manufacturers:

Campaign donations by health insurance companies and drug manufacturers:

Campaign donations by big media companies:

Corporations choose our government: If there were a politician who would do something that these big corporations did not like, like try to regulate them, that politician could never get the campaign funding to compete with the politicians who do what the corporations want. So when you vote, you are voting for people who have been preselected by the big corporations. Our elections are a farce. By the time we vote, the decisions have already been made by the major corporations. We never have any say. It’s no wonder people are tuned out of politics.

What can we do about it? Corporations are in control now, and they will not give up that control without a fight. The political system is broken, so we cannot use that system to fix the system. We must work outside the system. We must build our numbers and demand that all big money be eliminated from all elections of all politicians of all parties. We must build our numbers to the point that our demand will be met. We must build our numbers by raising awareness of this problem.

Set our differences aside and unite: The key to solving this problem is for us to temporarily set aside our political differences and unite to take control of our country back from the corporations. This is a nonpartisan issue that appeals to a broad base across the political spectrum. Most of us agree that we the people should run our government, so we should focus on that point of agreement for now, unite on it, and use our combined power to take our country back. Later we can get back to our political squabbles, but for now we should unite.