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Once again David shows how big corporations and their government lackeys have gamed the system and rigged the legal rules so they win and ordinary people suffer for it and are denied justice. One more time David shows us how to fight back and win.The Sum of It All for Ordinary People
David sums up his thoughts in a final chapter asking when "will this downward spiral ever end?" He then goes on to tell us the good news and the bad. As if we didn't know it, he stresses the bad news is both major political parties are complicit with their corporate allies and willingly aid them in their hostile takeover. So any time we're able to throw the bums out, we're just likely to get new bums. David adds more bad news explaining "the media" largely ignore what's going on. I'd go much further than David and say the "media" are the dominant corporate media, and they're in on the scam as they too benefit from it. The reporters and pundits they have on air or in print have little latitude beyond what their employers expect them to do. If they want to keep their jobs, they'll support corporate-friendly policies because they're good for business including the companies they work for.
I must briefly add an update to David's reported good news on alternative media sources. It seems when things are getting too good for consumers, corporate America mounts an offensive to regain the offensive and grow their profits handsomely in the process. That's what the telephone and cable companies are now doing in Congress with their attempt to make the Web a gated community. They want to destroy net neutrality by gaining the right to charge their Web site customers based on the amount of their traffic. Their plan is to be able to offer a new tier of broadband service to companies using their networks to make them pay more for speedier access. There's lots more they want as well, if they can get it, that will benefit them but hurt consumers. There's now momentum building on Capitol Hill to head off this intrusion to rewrite the rules and hurt our internet freedoms. We won't know the outcome for a while, but the stakes for the public are very high and the adversary we face is very powerful and committed to beat us.
Overall on all the issues he discussed in his book, David admits we face a tough struggle and that "for every victory.....there are many more defeats." But he ends the book with his final prescription on how we can fight back, and I'll list the ones he's chosen:
1. Reject the idea that we can't bring about change. History shows we can if we're fully committed.
2. Get informed on what's going on and how it's harming us. It's not that hard if we try, but you won't get it on TV or in your morning paper.
3. Fight back at the grass roots. That's how Republicans began their rise to power back when Democrats controlled the White House for 20 years and the Congress for much longer. It starts at the local level and goes up from there. In my city of Chicago, it's called the city council and various boards that run the functions of government.
4. Don't get co-opted by the system. Instead, organize ordinary people for political action where you live. Remember how former Democrat and House Speaker Tip O'Neill characterized the system when he said "all politics is local." His grammar may have been bad, but his wisdom was sound.
5. Campaign and fight for public funding of elections. As long as private money rules, they win and we lose.
David ends on a very upbeat note, and I'll add my own after his from my article on the same subject. He cites our history of an active population that in the past fought back and won major victories - ending slavery, women's rights including to vote, the right to organize, civil rights and lots more. We've always fought injustice when it got bad enough and those affected wouldn't take it anymore. David concludes he's confident our outrage will grow enough to make us fight back again and lead us to a better future. And I'll end this section with a quote by famed Chicago community organizer Sol Linowitz who understood and preached that "the way to beat organized money is with organized people." He proved it.
My Own Summation of David's Important Book
I loved the book, especially because I wrote about the same subject using the same title as I stated at the outset. I also said up front and will repeat again that everyone should read David's book as a starting point to learning what's wrong that's harming us and getting worse and then learn how we can fight back and win.
That said, I have some suggestions for David in future editions of this book. I covered a few issues David didn't in my Hostile Takeover article, the earlier companion one to it I called Democracy in America - It's Spelled C-O-R-R-U-P-T-O-N and other writing. I'll list three important ones briefly and end.
l. Obscene levels of military spending that benefit the defense contractors and all other companies serving the military - industrial complex have hurt the public enormously. I wrote that the Center for Defense Information reported that since 1945 over $21 trillion dollars has been sucked out of the economy for military spending largely to benefit US corporations even though the country had no real enemies all through those years - and we were lied to all that time to make us believe we did. The public paid for this largesse through our taxes that should have been spent on essential social services we never got.
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