Today, I was present at a 9:00 AM meeting of the Monroe County Commision where the local Move to Amend resolution was read, commented on, and passed.
Mark Stoops, County Commissioner, read the resolution out loud. It is a remarkable document, detailing a range of insidious effects that the infamous ruling with the Orwellian name, “Citizens United,” by the U.S. Supreme Court, has on what one citizen this morning called “the sacred individual vote.”
Here it is: Resolution 12-09:
The resolution was passed by the City Council, 9-0, a few months ago. Now the County Council has taken the same step. In this, Bloomington city and Monroe County join hundreds of municipalities and other local, county, state, and regional governmental bodies to begin to reverse the January 21, 2010 pernicious Supreme Court decision that has opened the floodgates of corporate money and is destroying our democracy in this presidential election year.
The local Move to Amend group got going in January, 2012, and has been meeting weekly ever since. They have a table at the weekly Farmer’s Market and plan to keep going until the Constitutional Amendment has been passed that will reverse the Supreme Court decision.
This morning, after the Move to Amend resolution was read, the meeting was opened for comments. About 15 citizens lined up to speak, most of them elders who take seriously their commitment to continue the tradition of direct democracy at the local level that works so resoundingly well in our fair city.
The first speaker was Charlotte Zietlow, a local eminence who, among other things, helped save and restore our beautiful Court House that sits in the center of our town square and who helped establish, as a City Councilwoman in the 1970s, the tradition of extraordinary civility and listening that still prevails in the room in which both City and County Councils are held.
Charlotte spoke of the effect of Citizen’s United on one local race, a long-shot bid by a bright, courageous young mother of three, Shelli Yoder, who is running a grassroots campaign for Indiana’s Ninth Congressional District seat against freshman Republican incumbent Todd Young. Young refuses to debate, doesn’t answer questions, and gets (I think Charlotte said) three quarters of his campaign money from PACs outside the state of Indiana.
One by one, these citizens stood up to speak, all but three of them old, and seasoned, and prepared to either give more history, or show more examples, of how money infects democracy when corporations, which actually have more rights than “natural persons” do, are without conscience and hold allegiance to no country, can buy elections. For 45 minutes their voices rose and fell as, one by one, each a rare member of a truly enlightened electorate, spoke what was in his mind and, especially, his heart.
As one speaker, in an anguished voice, reminded the commissioners, our (county) government is the highest level that has not yet been corrupted by money in politics, the highest level in which we can still participate as a direct democracy.
If ever there was a time for citizen participation, it is now, at local levels, all over this land. Let us take our country back. Let us take our planet back.
Now, this very day when Saturn moves into Scorpio for a three-year run, inaugurates the time when we must gear down to the lowest gear, for what may be the longest uphill climb of our lives as citizens of this country and this planet.
Saturn counsels patience, strategy, plans, rational actions with a clear goal in mind. Saturn in Scorpio rewards working at subterranean levels, down in the deeps of our democracy, where sovereign citizens are reborn. And Saturn in Scorpio recognizes perfidy when it sees it, faces and erases, after a long and mighty struggle, the forces of darkness that threaten to take us down.
So interesting that on the day that Saturn moved into Scorpio I would be impelled to attend this meeting, the result of long and careful planning, by the Move to Amend group of Bloomington.
And how interesting that after this meeting, I decided to take puppy Shadow for a walk before driving home, figuring I’d just make it back in time before my two-hour parking allotment ran out. Well, I did not. Five minutes past the deadline, I was greeted with a $20 parking ticket.
It just goes to show: Saturn insists on strict rules, on recognizing how 3D time works, and staying within its boundaries. I thought I could “get away with it this once.” I was wrong. Saturn in Scorpio is where karma comes due.
