AMP: Artists' Meeting Place and Resource Collective

Once upon a May 15th, maybe this one, the e-mail accounts of all major newspapers were clogged with thousands of messages sent on that day between noon and 2 pm.. All the messages were brief: 'Impeach by September' . The papers tried to ignore the terse sentiment, tho' the flood of messages shut down their systems.

Oddly, that same day during those same hours, the same thing happened to the Congressional e-mail system.

Wierdest of all, the largest corporate donors of each congressional representative also experienced the same shutdown for the same reasons.

And then, by strange coincidence the same thing happened the next day! And the next! And the next! For thirty days!

The corporate donors began to get upset as this was threatening their bottom line, all that shutting down. CEOs even began to worry that human people would appear unannounced in numbers on K street and disrupt the lobbying industry, maybe by staging a sit-in requiring police to drag them away. And that is just what happened on June 15th! And not just on K Street but in front of corporate headquarters all across the country!

In vain, CEOs pleaded that they had no control over legislators or lawmaking. In vain, because the people knew who had the ear of Congress, who could meet with representatives and senators, whose calls and e-mails were answered personally, all so unlike the general public. The public knew perfectly well who the representatives were really representing. The public knew the way to a Congressman's heart was through his campaign donors.

Then, on June 17th, a Monday, hundreds of thousands of citizens failed to shop, failed to drive cars and failed to show up at work.
Coincidence or protest? If the newspapers and Congress and corporate honchos had read their mail, they'd know for sure...so they mostly didn't, and if they did, they denied it, and if they admitted to reading it, they demanded anonymity. It wouldn't do to let the great unwashed think they, the rabble rousing citizenry, could apply economic pressure on them, the kingmakers.

But e-mails had continued to arrive each day since May 15th, to the newspapers and news programs, to the Congress, to corporate donor offices, all with the message "Impeach by September". News editors wrote stern editorials about radical fringes and Congress issued stern warnings about energizing the opposite party's base and reiterated they'd taken Impeachment out of the Constitution by Speaker fiat.

CEOs were beginning to get unsettled by it all, only because they feared profits would eventually suffer. Indeed, they'd already had to take constant measures to repel the oceans of e-mail that came in every day between noon and 2 pm. It was costing them money.

And on July 15th, there was again a plunge in sales of goods and gasoline and another steep spike in absentees from workplaces.
The e-mail messages continued, noon to 2 pm, and due to various outrageous incidents involving the president and his deceitful and incompetent cronies, further deterioration in the war de jour, and hikes in the cost of living, the volume of e-mails had increased steadily.

Keeping the president in office was beginning to affect the smooth exchange of money and gifts from lobbyists for sweetheart legislation from Congress. It was beginning to disrupt the flow of obscene profits from the shopper to the corporations (all of which, like any use of wealth to coerce action, falls under free speech -- money really does talk).

It seemed at last that if the public couldn't vote directly with money like the lobbyists, if they couldn't buy free speech like the corporations, they could chip away a bit of the monetary vote and the expensive free speech from those who had once considered them irrelevant.

After a summer of unrelenting e-mail pile-ups and system shutdowns and reconfigurings and flash unannounced sit-ins on K street and at corporate headquarters across the nation, newspapers, responding to advertisers, and Congress, responding to lobbyists, began to see the president's continuance in office as intolerable.

Seizing on the latest adminstration scandal, an easy task as scandals sprouted by the hour like mushrooms, the editors screamed for impeachment and politicians obliged.

Thus the evil president was hoist by his own corporate petard when the people took their case directly to big business and demanded action from those who could make it happen.

The moral of the story, as Uncle Scam was to reaffirm righteously: We vote with our money in this country -- and the system works.

Noon-2pm -- Pass it on.