"small groups of protesters entered House office buildings in a bid to meet with individual members of Congress. Participants later in the evening marched to the Supreme Court and the White House."
Even the Washington Post got it right, no doubt thanks to numerous meetings with activists getting wiser and meeting with reporters and editors repeatedly in case they really, really still did not understand "why are we here." The WaPo report,"What Occupy DC wants: Less corporate money in politics," quotes "Brian":
"Our government has allowed policy, laws and justice to be for sale to the highest bidder....There needs to be a limit on the amount of money you can spend on elections, or can contribute..."
In case the media still didn't get it, the Occupiers started the day with a march on Bank of America.
Two days ago Occupy DC passed a "Corporate Personhood Resolution," which states, as HuffPo reports:
In 2010, the United States Supreme Court decided in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission that independent spending on elections by corporations and other groups could not be limited by government regulations. This decision is only the latest in a long line of judicial rulings that have invented the legal doctrine of corporate personhood, affording corporations the same constitutional rights as people.
Occupy DC joins Move To Amend the Constitution, which is holding actions at courthouses across the country tomorrow, Friday, demanding the ratification of a constitutional amendment which would supersede the Supreme Court decision in Buckley v. Valeo, in which money was first equated to speech, as if the equivalent of handing a $100 bribe for a police officer to not give you a traffic ticket had anything to do with the First Amendment.
A rather remarkable OpenSecrets.org report on Occupy DC covers an earlier speech by Harvard law professor Lawrence Lessig:
Lessig emphasized corruption in our current government -- not of the bribery variety a la Rod Blagojevich, but rather in Congress' dependence on money, money that is mostly from corporations and a tiny proportion of the population.
"Forget 99 percent, we are the 99.5 percent," Lessig told the audience "Only .05 percent of America gave the max contribution of $2,500 to candidates last election."
Lessig's statistics are correct, according to research by the Center for Responsive Politics. Only .05 percent of the U.S. population gave the legal maximum to at least one candidate, which was $2,400 per election during the 2010 cycle.
In fact, only 0.26 percent of the U.S. population gave more than $200, the level at which public disclosure of contribution records is mandated by the Federal Elections Commission.
Yet these 818,700 or so donors accounted for 67.7 percent of the total contributions to federal candidates that election cycle.
In the report Ben Thompson, an Occupier from Bethesda, Md., told OpenSecrets Blog: "The money from Wall Street flows to K Street."
Indeed, MAPLight.org, which is based on the OpenSecrets.org database, found, even more startlingly, that on average, 80 percent of congress members and senators campaign funds come from outside their districts, and largely from outside their states. MAPLight found a distinct flow of money from a small number of wealthy zip codes, such as Westchester County and Chevy Chase, MD, to congressmen representing many poorer, rural zip codes. A vote is a vote. It doesn't matter where it comes from. And the most money by far emanated from addresses in and around the Washington DC beltway, i.e., where lobbyists and PACs live. These are the findings in the MAPLight.org report entitled "Remote Control."
The Constitution provides that an amendment may be proposed either by the Congress with a two-thirds majority vote in both the House of Representatives and the Senate or by a constitutional convention called for by two-thirds of the State legislatures. These are the same state legislators in whose hands any efforts to pass recall laws aimed at U.S. congressmen and senators would rest. In many ways, the imperious indifference of incumbents in Washington these days points to citizens getting reacquainted with their state legislators.
(Note: You can view every article as one long page if you sign up as an Advocate Member, or higher).
1
