a
few words about
governments
and corporations
"The CONGRESS,
of course, is a whorehouse, and so is the
White House."
Ronnie Dugger, the retired editor
of the crusading Texas Observer weekly wasn't talking about Monica. The
real prostitutes,
he said, are leaders of both parties who've sold themselves - and a chunk
of the American dream - to Big Corporations and Big Money to finance their
campaigns: "Everybody in the United States knows
that Congress is bought.
We know that PACs
(money-donating political action committees) are legalized
bribery.
And we know that what the corporations
want, the corporations get."
Big Corporations
foul the environment, manipulate the economy, pollute elections with cash,
bust unions and shaft workers. Officials move from companies to
government and back.
They get away with it all in
large part, Dugger says, because,
"In
1886 the Supreme
Court decided, insanely,
that corporations
are 'persons',
with the
rights our forbearers intended only for people."
The result, he says, is "crypto-fascism."
Dugger is a Democrat who realized
that his party's national leaders
- including the "New
Democrat" in the White House -
are looking more Republican
as they chase political donors.
(Writer
Studs Turkel defines a New Democrat as "an old Young Republican.)
Dugger mixes his raw-meat words
with such pointy-head phrases as "paradigm shift" and "oligarchy." And
with statistics on the rising wealth and lower taxes of corporations,
while the reverse is happening
to real people. His words ring in the gut and the head:
"As I understand the serious
political science definition of fascism, it's
when the
actual
governing is done by Big Business, in league with the government.
Well, what's happened in this
country?
"We have maintained democratic
forms - elections, representative democracy,
members of Congress voted in
by majority. They take bills up, have hearings.
It looks
like democracy.
But what's
permitted to pass through the forms into law is bought and paid for.
" He slammed a hand on the table.
"Now, that's the truth! That's a fact!" Slam again.
"It's a new form of fascism.
Our decisions are being made
by a corporate oligarchy, through the government they control." THREE YEARS
ago, Dugger decided to do something about it.
He wrote a fiery piece for The
Nation magazine:
"The big
corporations and centimillionaires and billionaires have taken daily control
of our work,
our pay,
our housing, our health, our pension funds, our bank and savings deposits,
our public
lands, our airwaves, our elections and our very government."
And that was just the opening
paragraph.
Dugger, 68, spent 40 years exposing
corrupt Texas politicians and corporations in the Observer.
In his Nation piece he called
for a rebirth of the anti-corporation Populist movement of the1800s. Then
he formed a group called The Alliance, to get it moving.
The bad news is that, so far,
it hasn't happened. Populist fervor hasn't swept the country.
Big corporations
are still in control.
I'd never even heard of The Alliance
until Dugger came to town last week
to speak at the Wayne Morse Free
Speech Forum.
Now I'm
ready to go bomb a corporate headquarters.
In talks in Eugene and other
Oregon cities, Dugger said peaceful revolution takes time:
"The only long-time answer is
to build a new movement, a new people movement."
Don
Bishoff of the Eugene Register-Guard
back
to fukt shit
