Election Reform

The rich and the corporate have their clubs, their entrenched power and, of course, their money. The poor majority needs TIME to counter all that money and power and establish fairness, and if they luck out with a leader like FDR as president, they need to be able to keep him in office BY VOTING FOR HIM--until he can tame the banksters, establish fair taxation, create great worker-paid programs like Social Security, and so on.

These things take TIME. The rich and the corporate OPPOSE FAIRNESS and fight it tooth and nail, as they did FDR and the New Deal.

And this is how OUR FOUNDERS wanted things to work. They put NO term limit on the president because they considered it UNDEMOCRATIC. They wanted the people to be able to have whomever they wanted as president. They were also leery of many of the same things that have come to haunt us--the banksters, corporations, the moneyed class--and tried to check their power--and one of the BALANCES they put in the Constitution, to counter these undemocratic influences, was NO TERM LIMIT ON THE PRESIDENT, i.e, giving the PEOPLES' chief representative the right to be re-elected, time and again, if the PEOPLE wished to do so. And that is exactly what the PEOPLE did, in electing FDR to FOUR terms in office.

People who support a term limit on the president often don't know this history, nor do they realize that the REPUBLICANS rammed the 22nd amendment through, in the mid-1950s, PRECISELY BECAUSE they wanted to prevent a "New Deal" from ever happening here again, and to begin dismantling the one we had--which they have very nearly accomplished.

That said, I would add a few caveats. One, we must--we really MUST--get rid of the 'TRADE SECRET' voting machines, as a first step to recovering our democracy. Two, we must then address the other ways that elections are stolen--the filthy campaign money, the corporate media propagandists, fascists getting put into positions of power over voting rolls, etc., BY the 'TRADE SECRET' voting machines and these other anti-democratic forces.

The voting machines are now largely (75%) controlled by ONE, PRIVATE, FAR RIGHTWING-CONNECTED corporation--ES&S, which bought out Diebold--with NO AUDIT AT ALL (comparison of ballots to electronic totals) in half the states in the U.S., and a miserably inadequate 1% audit in the other half.

We MUST get rid of these machines and restore PUBLIC voting counting. It's the bottom line of democracy. Without it, we don't really have a democracy.

We can argue up one side and down another, about term limits, and it is all meaningless when our votes are no longer counted in the PUBLIC VENUE.

The very counting of our votes has been PRIVATIZED. We MUST change this!

We will NEVER see a "New Deal" in this country again--we will NEVER see fairness in this country again--until we do.