You Remember It, Don't You? An Incredible, Hope-Filled Year

Dear Alex Cockburn,

It was a pleasure to read your diary of January 1, 2008, "You Remember It, Don't You? An Incredible, Hope-Filled Year", http://www.counterpunch.org/cockburn01022009.html :

' It’s time to take stock of the landscape.  The American political system, as conditioned by corporate cash, legal obstructions to independent candidacies, the corporate press,  is designed to eliminate any substantive threat to business as usual. In the case of the Democrats, the winnowing process is working well.  Mike Gravel, by far the most vivacious and radical of the party’s candidates on substantive matter of the war and empire, was swiftly  marginalized. I’ve seen very few Gravel buttons. '

There was a young Chase, from Massachusetts/New Hampshire, the manager of the family hedge fund, who sent me, and anyone else who cared to ask for one, a lawn sign and bumper stickers for Mike's campaign.

http://www.flickr.com/search/?q=gravel&w=76443308%40N00

As you point out Mike did not prevail. Mike was and is the single most inspiring of US politicians to me. He is a real person driven by his own engine, not unlike yourself presumably, encouraging us all to simply take control of our government and destiny.

Although I have problems with the proposed implementation of his National Initiative for Democracy (http://www.ni4d.us) and have proposed not so much my own alternative (although that's all it is right now http://www.uspvp.org) as a call to all of us to implement Mike's idea, I am sure that the time has come for a national initiative, referendum, and recall just as it had a hundred years ago when the corporations, railroads chiefly, had bought the political apparatus in the states. Of course Mike is responsible for that insight "of mine".

Mike Gravel is my man. I dropped everything after hearing him say on the Democratic stage with Senators Biden, Clinton, Dodd, and Obama looking on in South Carolina that he'd end the Iraq War in sixty days (later and officially one-hundred twenty) by filibuster in the US Senate. It could have been... could be... done.

In fact all the required means to simply take back control of our nation lie at our feet. All we need do is stoop to pick them up and use them. All we need do is to follow the example of Mike Gravel.