Part Three-Supremes Seaside Signal Series, New Strengths Combined Can Rescue Nation.
(EUGENE, Ore.) - The 'massive movement of millions' historically, has been the only engine to eliminate any major default in our system of democracy. Three now-famed American Presidents found it so after a disappointing first-year administration followed by acclaimed achievement of historic proportion.
For Lincoln, his courage and deeply-held conviction led him to become the Great Emancipator. For FDR, his determined patient approach allowed him to achieve “the New Deal”, foundation of our famed American Middle Class of today.
For John F. Kennedy, rising then-radical, strongly renewed demand for civil rights built his strength to achieve great changes still shaping and guiding this nation. FDR’s famed positive try-it-out attitude is best exemplified by what he told one potent presidential advisory group, offering him a well-planned program for substantive change: Now, you must make me do it!
He was clearly referring to people-power, to pure persistence, and to patience while all details demanded were worked out by the overwhelming power of potent democratic consensus.
Similar situations, stressing essentially the same solid reliance on those three democratic system-virtues, can be found for both Lincoln and Kennedy, as well as for all the rest of our long line of successful Presidents.
NOW our nation faces another true Constitutional challenge brought potently to those in power by the interior cabal consolidated within the Supreme Court, pledged to so-called conservative principle.
Free speech as cover for corporate dollar-power --clearly applied to purchase governance itself-- is now the inevitable consequence, threatening democracy at its very foundation: Broad citizen understanding of burgeoning issues, potent new problems, complex management decisions. Never has the impact of mass communications been under such broad --perhaps overwhelming-- threat since the First Amendment itself was achieved.
Never has the need for potent performance of the American press by the standards of its democratic chartered responsibilities been heavier or more essential on each and every media format and channel.
AND NEVER have those channels -by far now corporate-owned, managed and sometimes manipulated-- been in a more precarious and presumptive position. The rapid progress of the Comcast-NBC “merger” (read: Comcast conquering) now recorded neatly as needing new-and-continuing lavish corporate campaign contributions to clearly-requisite Congressional leaders, is a distressing case-in-point “happening right now”.
On these channels now must fall, without escape, the consequences of what-and-how “the public” does finally react to problems and challenges the like of which we’ve never encountered before at this level.
The continuing trend towards constantly growing public distrust of all governance --with good reason in far too many instances-- makes any action whatsoever both questionable and dangerous. Yet action there must be --by demonstration of open, democratic, deeply-informed coverage converging public attention on what counts, why it does so, and what must NOW be done.
UNFAILINGLY, true, open, democratic public opinion demanding and demonstrating patience and persistence, activated by people-power, will prove to be the key to any remediation still possible.
That’s WHY the Supreme Court’s conservative cabal may just have lighted a fuse which will flash along the firecord --with an explosion of consequences, one way or the other, already in early smolder in Congress. Their impatience with progress and more demand for more positive change must now add a fourth democratic virtue to the potent power of the other three! Corporate campaign contributions have already furnished the overwhelming lavishly “laid-on” cash which constitutes cunningly-contrived manipulation, meant to conquer particularly-placed people wielding new power. wherever it may be found.
The entire objective, the over-reaching supreme goal, of all such activities is to install “Corporatism” as the ruling radical governing philosophy, replacing that truly American one our Founders so fittingly --and also flexibly-- described in the Constitution and the Bill of Rights.
Corporatism combines and consolidates complex and confusing operations and many management means for carrying on manipulations. It is cannily contrived to replace our Constitutional system for essential services with corporate-controlled governance providing those once-government/activities people must have --more than ever in the 21st Century.
The best-possible weapons remain the same as in every other similar situation throughout our American history: Patience, Persistence, People-Power. A particularly vulnerable, now well-understood, already- ”working” system built on that basic foundation is the current healthcare “system”.
Experiences now widely shared and well reported by millions demonstrate conclusively that this system has been formed by coalescing combination of most current suppliers of the services and products, rather than “the government”. WHO makes basic decisions among those whose leadership is most demanded for operating the system?
It is NOT our ELECTED representatives, choosing and organizing a democratic system they then control, based on what our Founders painfully presented to us. It is not “government control” but “dollar-control” - -and by those NEVER ELECTED nor otherwise chosen. NOW the insurance provider puts potent dollar power to work, with the human result shaped by what the dollars tell the toll-taker!
Sometimes that toll-shaped result even tells the physician, or the medical-means/supplier or even the hospital administrator --OR the hospice-host !-- what can and will be done: With or without quality-of-care consideration for what may be truly needed, decided by those by far best qualified to know and then DO.
It is the providers of system-shaping “insurance” that now pave the way for the profound take-over thus made possible for that very human-rights essential: The right to effective, efficient healthcare.
That’s why the American public is apparently so lethargic, so late-to-understand, so reluctant to relate to the demanded changes essential not only to “fix a broken system” and extend benefits to millions now still deprived -- but also in a system surely fast becoming “unsustainable” as it now exists: Too many are too fearful of losing what they now have, while --painfullyfor most-- realizing how fearful others are, now barred from participation in what most Americans know is a “broken, corrupted, corporate controlled” national catastrophe.
Healthcare, ironically, has become the symbolic situation for comprehensive misunderstandings and the complex controversies thus sure to arise -- the veryleast-” healthy” situation possible to imagine for our democracy. The answer is- you already knew... Patience, Persistence, People-Power, using democracy’s best defenseve weapon: The VOTE, at local, state, national levels, repeatedly, insistently, progressively.
In a single word: Democratically. Undeniably strong, costly and broad comprehensive propaganda/efforts, lavishly dollar-driven via corporate privzte-gain support, is the obvious showpiece for what can be accomplished NOW --via the Supreme Court’s further blessing of perverted power, gifted to ANY corporate entity for ANY “political speech” format.
Those very flat-fact situations mirror and very meaningfully illuminate what we can expect will follow in further corporatism-shaped attacks on what’s left of democratic control within the system we inherited from our Founders.
BUT finally, in any number of potently-telling situations all around the nation, there is arising AGAIN the birth-signs of a solid progressive movement which as it burgeons and becomes more VOTE-and INITIATIVE significant, can once again rescue the nation from its current insidious disease of indifference, default and do nothingness. “ A new rebellion” against corporatism can sweep away the national debris and open wide the gates for a return to Founders’ principles for all of us.
Parties partially collapsed by corporate control, job and human security losses, pensions flown-away with departing plants leaving for low-wage “developing nations”, the monstrous movement of manufacturing jobs to these same locations --even a Yo-Yo economy in which You Are On Your Own -- those have all become the universal targets. HOW do we Get There from Here ? Let’s begin by building strong Congressional action to reverse and remedy the Supreme Court silly action further arming the corporate predators. Watch for what will soon follow, and do your part when that action does start.
At 21, Henry Clay Ruark was Aroostook Editor for the Bangor, Maine DAILY NEWS, covering the upper 1/4 of the state. In the ‘40s, he was Staff Correspondent, then New England Wires Editor at United Press-Boston; later Editor for the Burlington, Vermont 3-daily group owned by Wm. Loeb, later notorious at Manchester, New Hampshire UNION LEADER for attacks on Democratic Presidential candidates.
Hank returned to Oregon to complete M. Ed. degree at OSU, went on to Indiana University for Ed.D. (abd) and special other course-work; was selected as first Information Director for NAVA in Washington, D.C.; helped write sections of NDEA, first Act to supply math, science, foreign language consultants to state depts. of education; joined Oregon Dept. of Education, where he served as NDEA administrator/Learning Media Consultant for ten years.
He joined Dr. Amo DeBernardis at PCC, helping establish, extend programs, facilities, Oregon/national public relations; moved to Chicago as Editor/Publisher of oldest educational-AV journal, reformed as AV GUIDE Magazine; then established and operated Learning Media Associates as general communications consultant group. Due to wife’s illness, he returned to Oregon in 1981, semi-retired, and has continued writing intermittently ever since, joining S-N in 2004. His Op Eds now total over 560 written since then.
Op Ed: People-Power, Perseverance Can Outmatch CorporatismSalem-News.com