UNLEASH DEMOCRACY POWER

1. Know the Two “Cracies”

2. Mobilize and Unify 3. Plan for POW!

4. POW!

Know the Two “Cracies”

It is said that if you know your enemies and know yourself,

you will not be imperiled in a hundred battles; if you do

not know your enemies but do know yourself, you will win

one and lose one; if you do not know your enemies nor yourself,

you will be imperiled in every single battle.

The Art of War by Sun Tzu

6th century BC Chinese General

Being a resolute pacifist and war hater, I surprise myself a bit with this quotation (although I’m relieved to know that war was a last resort for the Chinese general). It’s not in my book. In it I hesitate to call the corpocracy an enemy, but it is absolutely an enemy of democracy and must be defeated if democracy and America are to survive. Mind you, I’m not advocating a revolutionary war to defeat the corpocracy. It would be a bloodbath and futile. One revolutionary war is enough notwithstanding Thomas Jefferson’s sentiment that “every generation needs a new revolution.”

What we desperately need is REFORM, peaceful, legal changes in our political system, our judicial system, and our economic system. The first step toward this wholesale reform is to know the two “cracies,” inside and out.

Know the Corpocracy for What it Is and Does

First, we need to know, as I explain in my Home Page of this web site, that the corpocracy is the Devil’s Marriage between powerful corporate interests and what used to be the people’s government. Second, we need to know the corpocracy’s telltale signs of its subjugation of the American people. I identify a few of them in The Corpocracy: Fact or Fiction? Third, we need to know the corpocracy’s many allies; the touts and shills, the cults small and large, foreign enemies, and indirectly the silent majority. Fourth, we need to know the corpocracy’s strategies for acquiring, keeping, and expanding its power, particularly the corporate partner’s strategies. They were first laid out in Lewis F. Powell’s “battle plan” in 1971 that I mention in my Home Page. Fifth, and most importantly, we need to know the corpocracy’s “badvantages” (i.e., advantages to bad behavior or wrongdoing, legal and illegal). Without them the corpocracy would vanish. The biggest badvantages of all are the dowries the government and its corporate partners give to each other day in, day out, year in, year out. We need to know the details of those dowries and how they are exploited by the corpocracy.

Know What True Democracy is Meant to Be

In a true democracy the people govern themselves by electing leaders among themselves to do the governing. How that governing is to be done is spelled out in our Constitution, which is meant to achieve six purposes for America; two of which are to “promote the general welfare” and to “secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and to our posterity,” purposes that can never be fulfilled in a corpocracy. A true democracy also has certain very fundamental elements. I describe them in The Corpocracy: Fact or Fiction?

Mobilize and Unify Democracy’s Allies

E Pluribus Unum: The corpocracy

E Pluribus Pluribus: The corpocracy’s opposition

E Pluribus Unum, “out of many one,” was the motto adopted by Congress in 1782 to symbolize the unity between the states and the federal government. It now symbolizes the unified diversity of the many different corporations and their industries, their union with government, and their many allies. E Pluribus Pluribus, “out of many, many,” symbolizes the status of the corpocracy’s opposition. As long as this status continues so too will the corpocracy. It knows fully well that a divided opposition is a conquered opposition.

Unify the Divided Opposition of the NGOs

Because “our” government has failed so spectacularly to uphold democracy numerous non-governmental organizations or NGOs have surfaced over the last several decades (and more continue to pop up now and then) to oppose the corpocracy They pursue their objectives through a variety of initiatives such as educational programs, litigation, lobbying (miniscule compared to the corpocracy’s lobbyists), organizing protests of one form or another, organizing political campaigns, and mobilizing supporters.

In browsing the websites of many NGOs I found 150 or so that seemed to warrant a closer look (e-mail me if you would like to see the list of them). I then looked at their types and memberships, their funding sources and budgets (when published), the issues they address, their missions, their activities, and whether NGOs with similar issues, missions, and activities ever collaborate with or even talk to each other.

The NGOs vary considerably in their size. The smallest NGOs may have only a handful or more members. Some of the smallest ones don’t last very long. They come and go. The largest ones have a million or more members and supporters. One, for example, has several million. But being large doesn’t necessarily mean that the NGO’s project initiatives are enduring or successful. They also come and go.

The smallest NGOs usually have the smallest budgets but not always. One very small NGO, for instance, posted a multi-million dollar budget. Many, however, seem to be operating on shoe-string budgets. Funding for expenses comes from individual donations or dues, foundation grants, and sometimes from the sale of products such as books, promotional materials, and the like. NGOs sometimes are desperate for funds after conducting expensive campaigns. I got an e-mail solicitation from one NGO saying it was over $1 million dollars in debt.

When I looked to see if NGOs with similar objectives coordinated their efforts or even collaborated on them, I found that in many instances NGOs didn’t even acknowledge the existence of other NGOs having similar objectives. Unlike the corpocracy with its unified diversity, these NGOs are long on diversity and short on unity. There are a few exceptions where a very small number of the NGOs come together as ad hoc alliances or coalitions to achieve specific goals but generally all of the NGOs pursue their own agendas. Had General George Washington’s troops been as scattered and divided we would still be subjects of the Crown.

So the corpocracy has withstood the best shots the various and sundry NGOs have thrown at it over these many years. Moreover, as the NGOs press ahead fragmented as they are they will be ill-equipped to counteract new defensive and offensive moves the corpocracy will be certain to initiate whenever it is seriously challenged.

If the corpocracy is to be ended and systemic reforms are to be achieved, I strongly believe it is imperative that these NGOs form an umbrella coalition. In my book, The Devil’s Marriage, I propose they organize into a virtual network called the U.S. Chamber of Democracy. It would be a deliberate counterforce to one of the corpocracy’s staunchest allies, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce.

Build the People’s “Reignbow” Coalition

When there’s a loss of political pressure,

prime the democracy pump.

The metaphor, I think, is an apt one. Pumps are primed when there is a loss of pressure. Priming takes muscle. There is pathetically little democracy muscle in America today. It has been thoroughly outmuscled by the corpocracy.

Occasionally in our history grassroots movements have fused into larger and wider movements such as the civil rights movement, the anti-Vietnam War protest movement, the women’s equal rights movement, the labor movement, the consumer movement, the anti-globalization movement, the gay rights movement, the anti-abortion movement, and the environmental movement. They arose when more people gradually realized that troubling issues either adversely affected their own lives too or were otherwise too widely consequential to be ignored. There is today no comparable social movement capable of seriously challenging today’s corpocracy.

That is why in my book I propose building the People’s “Reign”bow Coalition. It is a homophone for the Reverend Jesse Jackson’s Rainbow Coalition. He garnered over 3 million and 6 million votes respectively in his 1984 and 1988 presidential bids. While his coalition is mostly of historical significance today, I give him credit for what he did. He, like Ralph Nader, was simply up against the corpocracy.

“Reignbow” is meant to connote a peoples’ movement intent on wresting reign from the corpocracy and returning it to the American people. There are 20 or so segments of the general public that need to be brought into the coalition.

Plan for POW!

POW! is another homophone, this one for Powell and his battle plan. The POW! Plan would be sort of a mirror image of his plan. His plan was to attack the major institutions in America, the political arena, the courts, the media, and education. The POW! Plan would be to do that and more in unleashing democracy power. There would be strategic goals and slews of initiatives for eliminating the corpocracy’s many badvantages by educating the public about the corpocracy’s telltale signs; mobilizing, unifying, and organizing the corpocracy’s opposition; closing the corpocracy’s political/judicial circus (e.g., end vote peddling, lobbying, and the like); digging up the corpocracy’s legal roots (e.g., unlimited corporate liability and corporate personhood); ending hands-off corporate criminals (e.g., plug up loopholes, prosecute and severely penalize criminal corporations); ending hand-outs to the corporate welfare queen (especially warfare welfare); and ending undemocratic capitalism (e.g., ending the privatization of public education, ending financial speculation, etc.).

POW!

Democracy power in its fullest prime would be unleashed and guided by its strategic goals to carry out the many initiatives described in The Devil’s Marriage. Without POW! we will continue living and suffering under the corpocracy.

Gary Brumback

www.democracypowernow.com