Citizens, not Consumers

It appears a commanding piece of the global puzzle is consumption. Educators and professionals are already working to help reform the system that some sixty thousand lobbyists in Washington D.C. yet know how to stop, or want to. Enormous lobbyists’ pressures and rugged competitions within and between corporations have submerged democracy, but not without the help of us, the consumptive citizenry during the last sixty years. It’s a compelling retraining for us USA citizens to remember we are politically powerful, not just consumers of goods and services.

“The system as we now have it, as it is moving completely out of control, anyone’s control; the system will not reform itself from the inside. There are too many people in Washington, too many lobbyists, too many office holders, who have a stake in the system just as it is. And so, my bottom line is that the only way we are going to save capitalism from itself, save us as consumers and investors from ourselves, and reassert our citizenship values is if we have a true citizenship movement. […]

“Nothing good will happen; we will not have affordable health care; we will not have a major change in climate regulation and environmental regulation to avoid climate change; we will not have any major policies that reduce inequality. In fact, if anything, we’ll have widening inequality—all of this—unless we get our democracy back. Getting our democracy back is the number one objective and must be the number one objective for anybody who is at all concerned about the reform of our society in any dimension. […]

“Corporations are not people; they are pieces of paper; they are contractual relationships. When we moralize, when we scold corporations […], we are indulging in an anthropomorphic fallacy. Corporations are not people; they should not be treated as citizens; they should not have rights under the Constitution; they should not have representation in our congress; they have no legitimate reason for being in Washington. Only people are citizens; only people should inhabit our democracy. This is not a country by and from and for the corporation. It is a country of citizens, who need to reassert their citizenship. […]

“[T]here is no substitute for laws and rules that require companies to play a game the way that we as citizens think the game ought to be played. To turn our back on democracy, to thumb our nose at it, to hold our nose when we talk about politics, is to give up the game, entirely. We can reassert our citizenship, and, we must.”
~ Robert Bernard Reich (b 1946), professor at University of California, Berkeley’s Goldman School of Public Policy, a trustee of the Economists for Peace and Security; refer Commonwealth Club dot org, transcribed from audio recorded September 18, 2007.

Our constant curiosity is key
to watching what’s being created.
~ David Moorhead