Call for a Constitutional Convention

Let's face it, our democracy is in a shambles. With corporations buying our elected representatives' votes on every important issue, and with our Supreme Court enabling their corrupting influence at every turn, we, the people, need to do something. Congress is unable and unwilling to reform itself.

Little Rhode Island, our smallest state, is working to get the ball rolling:

Rhode Island's David Segal's Call for a Constitutional Convention

From the article:

The push for a [Constitutional] convention is not a step lightly taken. Ours is the world's oldest continuous (written) constitutional government. There is plainly something our framers got right.

Yet it is impossible for any fair minded soul, whether Democratic or Republican, to look at the current state of the American democracy and not believe that something has gone profoundly wrong. Our framers intended a Congress "dependent upon the people alone." We have evolved a Congress dependent upon campaign funders. That competing, and indeed corrupting, dependency has destroyed Congress's ability to answer its first obligation fairly. It has distracted Congress from the demands that this democracy makes upon it, and fundamentally weakened America's trust in this the most important branch of the Framers' design...

Is a body so deeply addicted to the current system capable of changing that system? Can we trust the victim of a dependency to free itself from that dependency?

More and more are coming to believe that the answer is no. That this system has so entrenched an economy of corruption -- not the corruption of bribes, but a corruption of the sole dependency our framers envisioned, upon the People -- that only outsiders can now change it. And our framers gave one kind of outsider -- state legislatures -- that power.

-- Lawrence Lessig, Professor of Law, Harvard Law School, on HuffingtonPost.com, June 14, 2010 10:22 AM

Reform Health Care Reform

Despite the hyperbolic cries of "socialism" from misinformed Limbaugh-listening, Fox 'news'-watching ditto heads, this bill is far too friendly to the corporate insurance industry.

To really bring health care costs down to where it should be in a truly market-driven economy, we need a robust public option or a Medicare buy-in option. Currently, there is very little competition between health insurance companies, as they have divvied up areas and pretty much charge what they want.

This bill, despite the exchanges to be created, will not reign in these greedy companies sufficiently, as their motivation is money, not the health of the American people.

Health care reform has been a long time coming, and the battle this time around has been fierce. The insurance companies and their corporate lobbyists threw everything they had at Congress and at the public to try to sway Congress in order to kill reform and keep things just the way they are.

Thanks to representatives like ours, Congresswoman Doris Matsui of Sacramento, California, we are on the way to true reform.

But please don't stop now. Let's get a public option (or the option to buy into Medicare) done, and that will not only bring down costs, it will insure we keep the "Corporations-First" party in the minority, where they belong.