For some 40 years now the business community has organized money and people for the purpose of seizing power over our lives. With the rise of the legal fiction known as the corporate person, we humans now serve immortal entities that increasingly set the rules by which we live. A permanent war mentality, alongside the acceptance of an economically segregated populace, rules our politics and shapes our future. How can we intervene and take back the power that business has seized?
I simply cannot lift up the election as a realistic hope for change, as much as I'd like to. Both parties serve the interests of business, war and segregation. No political party lifts up the rights of our habitat, the earth, as a priority. Neither party calls for a reduction of our imperial war mongering with its inevitable consequence, an increasing national security state. Neither party has a plan to put a cap on wealth or a floorboard under poverty. Neither party has a moral philosophy that affirms that either too much wealth in the hands of too few people, or too much poverty borne by too many people, are indictors of a failed state. Sadly, the greed of materialism, a culture with no higher purpose than to get what I can while the getting's good, is still the dominant ideology that drives our politics.
Rather than roll over into the pit of despair in these sad, dark times, I propose that we continue to live in hope, even if hope itself is just a pinprick of light. One avenue of living in hope is to continue a civic conversation. Recently a group of us launched Measure 103 (www.i103.org) a locally based initiative that would limit corporate rights in the City of Seattle. As part of this initiative we are also creating the Common Good Caf