Breaking news - Some voters buck tide, vote in their own interests

This just in.  It seems that contrary to the Republican/corporate sweep across America, there were a few pockets of crusty holdouts who voted in their own best interests, not the interests of corporations, as so many of their fellow voters did last Tuesday.

Shocking as it is, some voters questioned the conventional and accepted wisdom of the Supreme Court , and said, "heck no corporations are not people, or if they are, I'm a more important person, and my interests come first."

They showed this contrariness by voting in favor of measures for raising the minimum wage in some surprising places like Arkansas for Pete's sake, home of Walmart, a very unhappy corporate person right now. They also passed measures against fracking, not just on the Left Coast, where measures passed in Mendocino and San Benito Counties, but in Ohio and Denton Texas.

But anyone feeling sorry for the corporations should take heart that they are not accepting this insult to their personhood lying down.  "Who are these peons, who probably committed voter fraud in the first place, to tell us we can't claim our God-given right to drill under their land and set their water on fire," asked an indigent spokesperson for the Texas Oil and Gas Association which is already cranking up a lawsuit  to overturn the fracking ban.   

  

In another unlikely and humiliating rebuff to the corporate authority, which really has their best interests at heart, voters in  Richmond California, home of  Chevron, who is itself a major employer (and polluter, thus also boosting the economy in terms of hospital admissions and sales of hazmat suits) rebuffed the hand picked City Council candidates Chevron spent millions of their hard earned money promoting with cheery billboards and TV ads.

 

"How could people be so blind as to vote for candidates belonging to something called the Richmond Progressive Alliance, bad branding if I've ever seen it," grumbled a corporate executive from his vacation home in Aruba, shortly after election results were posted online and blasted out by all the major news outlets in the country.

"Next time, we'll hire some guys to dress in baggy pants and hoodies to go out into the hood and talk sense into these people, except now we have to pay them $15 an hour, so we have to think long and hard on that one."

Maybe a lawsuit would be more effective.

Game over - New game on!

It's never too soon to start campaigning for the next cycle, or to start planning anyway. You lost? Take today off, regrop, figure out what went wrong, what went right, and if you think it might work the next time.

Sadly, today the country lost. But we are resilient and will pick up and move forward. We survived Nixon and Bushes. 2016 - here we come!

Millennials might take a lesson from Boomers

So the Millennials will not be voting or even worse, those who bother to vote may be voting Republican.  So says an oped citing a Harvard poll in today's SF Chronicle.  Many of us Boomers didn't vote either, back in the day,we who were too busy making revolution, or smashing the state.  At least we got out and did something, even if it didn't work. Think of the power of all those votes that weren't cast.

Millennials have the power too, if they choose to use it.  If all the 30 and unders got out to vote, and even if they started running for office themselves, they could make a difference. They could drive the discussion, rule the elections, see the change they are now too cynical to believe will ever happen. (Can cynicism explain why the ones who say they will vote Republican outnumber those who will vote Democratic?)

If Boomers had voted in the numbers they had in the sixties, we may have seen a very different government over the last fifty years.  Think of it, then do something about the next fifty.

The future is in your hands.

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