Hearthstones

When middle class Americans see something is wrong, we can change it.

Freedom without exercising a political voice is not freedom. It is submission.

The American middle class has four kinds of political power we can use every day:

When we feel powerless, it’s mainly because of our own silence. We can SPEAK OUT...on line and in conversations with family, friends, neighbors, and co-workers.
Our earnings and our spending sustain our economy. How do we the most get political mileage out of our everyday dollar power? ...scroll down to SPENDING.
We can SUPPORT causes we care about in our conversations and by donating our time, skills and money.
We can vote far more often than on election day—any time we communicate with any politician we are voting. Scroll down for more information about E-VOTING, and for a web site with online links to current national and state office-holders.

...During a daily briefing [by White House spokeswoman Dana Perino] in which reporters…questioned whether the [George W.] Bush administration cares about input from the public, she said,

“The American people have input every four years, and that’s the way our system is set up.” (Newsweek, March 31,2008, p. 23)

Every four years? Wrong.

The national political power of America's middle class is not limited to one vote every four years—we can make our voices heard and our power felt far more often than that.

In fact, we have five kinds of input available to us every day: we talk, we communicate on line, we spend, we support causes we believe in, and we can e-vote far more often than on a Presidential Election Day.

An E-VOTE is a short message about one specific issue that we send to our elected politicians, candidates, and the media. Any time we communicate with any politician we are voting, and the Internet makes it easy for us to communicate our views and be counted—far more often than on election day.

The web site http://www.usa.gov/Contact/Elected.shtml gets us directly to the on-line web forms of current federal and state office-holders. We can send them our own comments and suggestions using the message boxes on those forms. Similar contact information for town and city officials, candidates for office, and the news media can usually be found at their own web sites.

Our politicians know we have the power to elect and re-elect those who listen to us and work for middle class concerns...and to remove those who don’t.

They need to hear directly from us about how we want them to vote.
They count how many constituents they hear from about an issue.
We can send an E-VOTE every time there is something specific that we want them to do to protect the middle class.
When we are silent, lobbyists and special interests get too many politicians' votes.

Helpful Hints for E-VOTING:

Sometimes politicians are influenced by clear and compelling personal messages from individuals; in that case, it’s most effective to summarize the whole story in the first one or two sentences.

Instead of providing email addresses, many office-holders ask constituents to complete a brief on-line web form in order to send them a message (probably to prevent email spam).

We can bookmark those contact pages for our representatives in our own browsers. Then it's quick and easy to copy and paste our own message into politicians' on-line comment spaces and send them our E-VOTES

It's important to provide name and zip code; Congressional staffers use zip codes to confirm that we're in their voting district. If we are, they add our E-VOTE to their count.

For hot national issues, some also count messages from outside their electoral regions, but they still want to know where we're from so they can see whether opinions are regional, or indicate a broad-based national consensus.

But don't send them the same message over and over. It's possible to identify the computer a message comes from, and repetitions can cause them to block all future communications from that computer.

Instead, encourage fellow citizens to speak out and send their own E-VOTES. Once we set up groups for email, Facebook, Twitter, etc., just a few clicks sends them all an E-VOTE message, to help them also vote more often than on Election Day.

Each of us is only one person, one vote, but together we can be a voice they will hear.

Middle class American sustains our market economy with our earnings and our spending. We can use our dollar power commercially and politically to 'speak quietly, and carry a big stick:'

We can complain—and name names publicly—when we encounter harmful business practices, bad products, mistaken advice, or poor service.
We can notify our state attorney general's office every time we encounter unsafe products, dishonest information, and false or misleading advertising.
We can remind any company that does us wrong that we can take our business elsewhere, advise others to do the same, and report our bad experience.
When we are satisfied customers, we can let each of those businesses know that we are bringing them our repeat business and recommending them to others.

There is more we can do to use our dollar power politically. We can:

Avoid buying from or investing in businesses whose employment practices harm any segment of the middle class.
Urge others to join us and refuse to buy any products or services from businesses, companies, or even countries with a history of unsafe products, dishonest practices, or failure to make good.
Contribute even a little to elected representatives and candidates who advocate for the middle class or protect our rights as consumers.

…The “small donor” phenomenon … has reshaped the political landscape this election cycle, as hundreds of thousands of voters - many of them newcomers to politics - invest themselves in the presidential campaign like never before....

These small donors are not the executives, bankers, and lawyers who typically give the maximum allowable amount per election to presidential hopefuls. They are retirees, teachers, church organists, priests, and firefighters. They are young and old, and they share a conviction that the future of their country is at stake.

"We have created a parallel public financing system where the American people decide if they want to support a campaign, they can get on the Internet and finance it," Obama told supporters....
(Scott Helman, "Small donors play huge role," Boston Globe, April 10, 2008, http://www.boston.com/news/nation/articles/2008/04/10/small_donors_play_huge_role/)

If you want others to know about Hearthstones, send them the web address: http://www.hearthstones.us/