OK, the Republicans are out of the picture. It will take parts of the country a while to come to terms with that. Especially the media, always behind the curve. Our TV screens and newspaper columns might still feature older, well-to-do, white conservatives but We, the People have taken back control.
One gift the conservatives gave us with their election tactics was a clear mandate for socialism. They spent weeks telling the country that an Obama victory was a victory for socialism. And We, the People came out and voted and provided a clear landslide mandate to "spread the wealth around."
Nowwe start the fight to create a country and an an economy that works for us, for We, the People.
Things that are for the people: Health care. Vacations. Child care. Mass transit. Unions. Pensions. Environmental protections and clean energy. Education. Nutrition. Housing. Income security.
What needs to change? Wow, where to start.
Our fight starts with getting corporate power under control and working for us again. That is job one. Corporations exist because We, the People make the laws and the roads and everything else that allows corporations to exist and make money. And we do the work. Why do we do this? For OUR benefit -- Why else would we? Did we set up this system so that a very few can use its resources to get all of the benefits of everything we all do? As this blog's motto has been for several years: Who is our economy for, anyway?
We need to get the influence of corporate money our of our politics and out of our lives. Corporate resources should not be used by executives to have influence on our politics. That is not what corporate resources are supposed to be for. We, the People are supposed to tell corporations how to behave, not the other way around.
We need to keep corporate influence away from how we think about politics as well! In a democracy it is up to We, the People to tell companies what they do, not the other way around. Beyond that, we also need controls on advertising to keep them from influencing our humanity -- what we think we need and want and how we think we should live our lives, just to sell products that harm us and the planet.
So job one is prohibiting the use of corporate resources to influence our politics, our thinking and our humanity.