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General News    H3'ed 2/26/17

Philadelphia Conference on Voting Justice and Democratizing Elections, Feb. 24-26, Friends Meeting House

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Cobb looked far back in history to Bacon's Rebellion, which occurred in what is now Massachusetts in the 1600s. African slaves united with white indentured servants and practically won. Hence, to avoid this dangerous alliance, the nobility created the concept of the white man and awarded some privileges to the indentured servants: they could own guns and some amount of property.

We must change the Constitution. 28 or 29 members of Congress agree, including one Republican from North Carolina.

He traced the origins of the Tea Party to the TARP bailout, conceived while G. W. Bush was a lame duck and completed by the Obama administration. Cobb called Obama a black Clinton and Clinton a white Obama. Instead of a New Deal, Obama infused Wall Street with cash and chose a former head of Goldman Sachs, Tim Geithner, for his Secretary of the Treasury.

The Tea Party might initially have united with the progressives, Cobb said, had the Koch brothers not taken them over.

Obama intimidated those favoring a single-payer option in health care.

The question "What's the matter with Kansas?" came up. It used to be a radical state in the nineteenth century but became as reactionary as it is today because of the entrance of the Democratic ruling elite and identity politics. The DLC, Clinton's hallmark, became the DNC, a collaborator with Wall Street.

Systematic transformational change must come from the outside by means of a Constitutional amendment. Cobb specified the two difficult processes requiring this and chose the easier one, focused on two-thirds approval by state assemblies, instead of by Congress, producing a formal proposal that three-fourths of the states must ratify. Passage of the Seventeenth Amendment was threatened by this method if it wasn't ratified. Hence the people now elect their no-longer-appointed U.S. senators.

We need a balanced budget and term limits.

We must get money out of politics. We don't have ten years to wait!

Cobb plans to hold movement schools to educate and motivate revolutionaries. "Don't come if you're not a revolutionary!" he warned.

We will either take over the Democratic Party or re-create the Green Party--or something different.

We must get involved in local elections.

When Democrats stopped funding precinct chairs, they killed the heart of democracy.

He recommended Thom Hartmann's visionary (2010) book Unequal Protection.

*****

EI activist and author Jonathan Simon's workshop in the afternoon focused on outreach and public support for reform.

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Marta Steele is an author/editor/blogger who has been writing for Opednews.com since 2006. She is also author of the 2012 book "Grassroots, Geeks, Pros, and Pols: The Election Integrity Movement's Nonstop Battle to Win Back the People's Vote, (more...)
 

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