The Rise of the Philistines
(See also: The Simple Plan for Congressional Reform
and Democratic revitalization)
Dividers not Uniters
We are one nation divided by two political parties.
The United States of America is a large, proud, prosperous, largely homogeneous, largely contiguous, democratic people unified by a common language, history, and heritage, with a constitution which, through political debate, balance and compromise, encourages our cohesion.
Our two political parties working dynamically together comprise the civil authority of the United States. Their specific responsibility is to resolve problems which face us that cannot be addressed locally and to plan for and alleviate any differences which might naturally arise to trouble our unity. Since we all pay their salaries they are civil employees of the state who are meant to work impartially, tirelessly and selflessly for the well being of all Americans equally and without preference.
And the melting pot has worked. Seen objectively, at least 70% of the people agree on 70% of the issues 70% of the time. Even such notoriously divisive issues as Roe v. Wade, deficit spending, defense and social security fall into this category. Given our coherence it is astonishing how seldom our political leaders seem able to locate a sweet spot of consensus between us to find agreement and move the country ahead in any direction.
Instead what our public servants do is take bribes by a part of the country to cheat the rest of it on their behalf. Rather than working honestly to ameliorate our differences and solve our problems they work tirelessly to exacerbate them. Instead of trying to unite us in common endeavor for the long term good and benefit of all, they spend every working, waking hour trying to deepen our differences and at each others throats for the sake of petty short term partisan advantage.
How common is it when any open wound of division in this country is traced back to its source to find a sniveling politician at the root of it? There they are working in their offices as tirelessly as maggots rooting in nuts trying to pull us farther apart rather than closer together. Behind their elaborately erected façades of patriotism and morality these politicians have become the parasites in the wounds of our divisions, not medicine working for the country but a malignancy working against it. By means of an endless concatenation of exaggeration, provocation, evocation and outright lie they have sought to polarize us, playing both ends off against the middle men (themselves).
Naturally, as in any negotiation, when the mediators at the heart of the ongoing debate for the future of the country are bribed and biased against their own sponsors, the common good of the country will always lay beyond the reach of their negotiations. When Lincoln said a house divided against itself cannot stand he was speaking to the disease of slavery. How much worse and petty are these entirely artificial politically manufactured destabilizations which are completely unwarranted except to continue to profit a corrupt political class at the expense of the people they are sworn to serve, keeping the population distracted and divided so the nation may not unite to toss them out?
Clearly craven money changers have infested the sacred temples of our democracy. These people are the working impediments to our unity and have become indistinguishable from the lobbyists they answer to. They have sold us out and have so reversed the divine equation of democracy that the policies they espouse are unerringly opposed to any which might profit us.
Both the purpose and result of their venality nicely coincide to guarantee that most Americans work for the least so the few may profit at the expense of the many. And our highly paid politicians who are sworn to work for all Americans equally, don’t bother. They work for the amoral, predatory institutions and people that have the least love or regard for the general well being of the nation, only to profit at its expense while guaranteeing its demise.
Money Changers in the Temple
As devout enemies of most of the people most of the time, our political class prefers not to solve problems rationally and fairly but to keep them virulent and alive as so-called wedge issues, for personal emolument, enrichment, fund raising and electioneering purposes. To their minds a problem solved is a waste of their energy but an issue growing worse and kept alive is a fund raising tool forever.
Naturally, some difference of approach, philosophy and theory are necessary to ensure the dynamic of debate in a democracy. This creates the harmonic balance and variance necessary to its proper operations. However, the extraordinarily divisive behavior of our political class is not positive but negative in its intentions and brings about precisely the polarization that all the true and better leaders of our past have gone out of their way to avoid. Therefore the result of our politicians’ work is not constructive but destructive to the public good, designed not to build consensus but to destroy it.
Their recent favored technique to achieve this is to evince a particular love of the abstract or unachievable goal stated in a definitive phrase repeated over and over, so blurry that it can neither be opposed nor achieved. Any issue defined negatively is always intended to be divisive. Such shibboleths as family values or alleged attacks on Christianity or a wide assortment of other ill-defined enemies are always referred to negatively as bogey men hidden under the bed. By diabolical intent, just among these three categories, the first cannot be legislated, the second requires unconstitutional placebos and the third decries a nonexistent enemy too nebulous to ever be confronted much less beaten.
Then they wrap these nebulous issues in an even larger inane invention which they call a “culture war”, presumably to be fought with political violence by “good” Americans against some alleged “bad” or unworthy Americans, whoever they may be.
In other words the issues they raise and have spent most time on are expressly designed for inaction. They are meant to engender nameless fears and prejudice and irrational contentions without offering any potential of resolution. They invent these divisive issues to disguise their lack of enterprise in addressing actual problems that go begging in the meantime. By always keeping the electorate focused on things in the distance which can’t be achieved to the exclusion of those in the present which must be addressed Congress has absolved itself from day to day consideration of all the necessary nuts and bolts details of actually running the country and generally winds up never doing anything.
Their hope has been that if you unfocus your eyes and unhinge your mind and listen to their fear mongering words instead of calculating the crass effects of their policies you may not even have heard the telltale rustle of money as they deftly empty your pocket of its contents or notice the faint scratch of pens scribbling across parchment as key tenets of the Constitution are rewritten.
The net effect of these political dividers to sow dissension among the public has been a destruction of shared national purpose and disunion. Our leaders have actually worked to destroy faith in our institutions, deconstruct the public sense of civility and break the bonds of trust and common purpose necessary to unite us. For political purposes, the complex problems facing the nation are reduced to simplistic inanities, then ignored and left to fester and rot.
Taken together their actions have combined to place the nation in a near free fall of mismanagement, lack of accountability, greed, hate mongering and every man for himself decline. At the end of all their McCarthy-like partisan schemes the only true enemies of America we ever find are the ones who organized the witch hunts in the first place. The very ones among us with the dimmest cultural grasp and the least acquaintance with the better angels of our heritage have proclaimed a culture war precisely in order to gut allegiance to the very principles which have made us supreme. The human wedge issue at the heart of all our contentions is your own Senator and Congressman. The barbarians are already inside the gates.
The Barbarians inside the Gates
Time was, not so many years ago when America had a reputation as a can-do society. It has been co-opted by a can’t do, won’t do, bet you can’t make us, won’t even try generation of governmental failure, avoidance of excellence and lack of leadership.
As a general rule a nation can only be as great as the effectiveness of its government allows. Yet looking back over the last quarter century it is nearly impossible to find a problem facing the country that has been fairly or efficaciously addressed by our political employees. And if not equitably addressed it may not be equitably solved and if not solved equitably it is not solved at all. As new problems arise unaddressed old ones are allowed to grow worse leaving us with layers and layers of new mindless bureaucracy piled on old obsolete bureaucracies, none of which works to proper effect even as their cross confusions stack together to mute and dull all specific accountability for the systemic failure they invariably bring about.
The simple master key as to why all this sudden, unprecedented and across the board governmental incompetence and decline has occurred comes clear when you see that our political class has injected its own profit motive into all its operations. Public money well and efficiently spent for public services is no longer goal enough for them. Today’s government programs are designed or invented specifically to generate kick backs and campaign contributions to their political sponsors. Our politicians not only refuse to see value in public service for its own sake but actually gratuitously go out of their way to block all good policies with lies and pretended qualifications. Private political profit rather than good public policy, as they have corrupted our elections, is what they see as their best health insurance of an easy reelection.
We have raised a generation of generic politicians with little to no personal ideals or public ethics. And they are growing worse. Our institutional memory is dimming. Most Americans are not old enough to have ever known responsive and good government and seem to imagine the maddening venality, dishonesty and mediocrity of today as normal. Many of our current officeholders ran for office holding to the informal notion not that government isn’t working well and needs to be fixed but under the bizarre banner that government can’t ever be made to work at all.
They believe this in spite of the obvious contrary evidence of the first two hundred years of our history. The contrast of their fecklessness with the greatness of our past should shame them but doesn’t. In the minds of our politicians the same American government that has become universally respected and emulated the world over is despised by our leaders at home not as a source of our success but only as an impediment to the failure they seem so eager to have us embrace for their own enrichment.
Once elected on the premise that the machinery of government can never be fixed these politicians have become self fulfilling prophesies of their own incompetence. Once freed (in their own minds) of the responsibility of doing their jobs (which they still insist can’t be done) to make government work properly they are conveniently alleviated from all ethics, hard work and responsibility to the voter. This has allowed them to approach their duties with unprecedented disregard, dishonesty and lack of scruples. They have evolved a self-profiting disdain bordering a scheme that public money should never be spent on programs going to aid the public! Rather, they believe our tax dollars should be redirected to “private” benefit, i.e. themselves and the ones who bribe them over and above their salaries.
Remarkable as it may seem to any other American, our government today has evolved a vested interest in continuing bad government. In this respect they may be said to have proven their own theory – people who don’t believe a government can work will never be able to get it to work as long as they are in charge of it. Obviously government under such a self-servingly delusional and corrupt caretaker regime can never get better but only continue to grow worse. Even when public disquiet finally forces them to pretend to address popular social issues like social security or the prescription drug reform they do it disingenuously.
The prescription drug plan recently concluded, for instance, maliciously combines the worst of two worlds, public and private, with the best of neither. Solely to victimize the elderly it neatly marries all the efficiency of a poorly designed, unnecessarily complex and uncompetitive government program with all the unresponsiveness, insensitivity and shortchanging high costs of monopolistic, for profit enterprises. Such programs are designed not for the effectiveness of the program but for the pay offs and kickbacks it generates to its promoters. This is how even universally accepted programs are transformed by corrupt politicians into wedge issues for their own personal and political profit. The prescription drug plan is a prescription not for health but for continuous waste, obsolescence, continuing schism and further decline.
Even something so important to us all as the war in Iraq is so riddled with private contractors and personal security firms that you’d think our government was at least as interested in who would be making money on the war as they were in who would actually win it. It is not a coincidence that under the control of this particular cadre of politicians history will certainly show the war in Iraq to have been the most dishonest, mismanaged and theft ridden war in American history.
Their attitude toward private graft as a vital goal of public policy also goes far to explain the burgeoning federal budget deficit and the completely failed response of government to a domestic natural disaster like hurricane Katrina.
The net result of these odd, anti-American, graft ridden, winner take all and devil take the hindmost manipulations against the public good is that the incentives for bad politicians to avoid solving problems has come to far outweigh any benefit to honest politicians (steadily decreasing in number anyway) that come from laying them to rest. Anyone who bravely steps forward with a solution to a large problem is immediately attacked by the inherent corruption of a system intent not on serving our interests but only on expanding its own self-profiting inertia and decay.
Obviously politicians do things this way because it works for them and beats working for us. Democracy well done is an often laborious enterprise. To properly weigh and balance the best interests of 300 million people in order to write legislation which fairly treats the majority at the same time care is taken not to trample minority interests is always a very delicate, shifting and difficult equation. How much easier is it for our political leaders to merely take bribes, blindly do what they’re told, and then simply misrepresent to the public the real reasons or intentions which motivate their policies?
These politicians are not legislators and law makers in the classical sense so much as fund raisers and cheap public relations artists in the present tense. This makes the legislative job so much easier to do (and so distasteful to any honest American) that it encourages the wrong type of person into office and promotes the worst of them to leadership positions. Our current politicians are so awash in their massively corrupt campaign slush funds they now even frequently use them to bribe each other.
The New Robber Barons
These are the new robber barons who have moved up from the lobby into effective control of the government itself. Inarguably the biggest lie ever told the American people by their politicians in the history of the United States (the justification for the war in Iraq may well be second) is the one which falls under the general rubric of “supply side economics” as it was put into effect. This convolution says not only that the wealthy have been unjustly overtaxed (!) but that huge tax cuts to that particular class of people would pay for themselves, create no deficit and would vicariously profit everyone who didn’t receive tax cuts in the country nearly as much as the ones who did receive them!
Since this theory was propagated to support unfair tax cuts in 1980 (and several others since) our government has generated wasteful expenditures which has taken them approximately $7, 500, 000, 000, 000 over budget. The gap between rich and poor and between the very, very rich and the middle class have both exploded exponentially. Since 1980 government policies have increased the federal budget deficit eight fold over what the nation had collectively accumulated in the first nearly two hundred years of our illustrious and industrious history. For all this increased debt it is hard to find any benefit to the nation that has derived from it.
The tax code they have saddled the nation with is arguably the most corrupt and complicated in history. It is scandalously, criminally corrupt and its very complexity is its defense against organized protest and eventual reform. Each line has been bought and paid for (and often written) by special interest money to steal from the rest of us. But they are not content just to rob us today. With the deficit they have inserted IOU’s into our future, to steal from our children their heritage.
A deficit is perhaps the purest and most unforgiving exemplar of self-destructive incompetence, dishonesty and mismanagement we know. Whenever an individual or corporation consistently spends more than they take in they will soon be facing bankruptcy. When a government year after year spends far more than it generates and has to borrow from lesser countries to meet its obligations it is an unmistakable sign of national decline.
Even though the deficit continues to climb, our bankrupt politicians and their covert owners claim this is an “acceptable” level of debt even though we have derived nothing from it but massive borrowed burden and expense, theft, graft, deceit and exceptional incompetence. Deficit spending is the laziest and most invidious of all scams on the people because it never requires our politicians to make a difficult decision. They never have to raise taxes or cut spending, so do neither. To accept deficit spending like this is to accept endemic corruption, dishonesty, inefficiency and decline as the essence of our government.
The Drain Brains
What is Congress’s response to all their massive and compound failures? Work harder? No, less. Now Congress works only two days a week, coming in late and leaving early, half the year. Inarguably this is not because they have already gotten their work done but because they have mistaken our inability to stop them as tacit acceptance of their corruption. They now believe that they have rendered us so impotent to hold them accountable for their behavior, no matter how egregious, that they seldom even bother to disguise their depredations against us.
So today they seldom even bother to read, much less debate and vote upon, details of the legislation they pass. They enact legislation they have not written but which they have been ordered to promote by the lobbyists in whose pockets they reside. They append earmarks (15,000 last year which cost approximately 50 billion dollars) to legislation in secret for “special” clients that cannot be deleted or traced. The budget is so heavily larded with so much pork, earmarks, give-aways and variances to special interests designed to enhance the possibility of their own reelections that they now insist the legislative process has become a run away train they claim they can no longer be held responsible for. So they propose unconstitutional remedies (like an executive branch line item veto) not to reform but to pretend to want to reform without ever really having to.
Even 9-11 and sending American troops to fight and die in Iraq has not been enough to rouse Congress from the torpid lethargy of lazy dishonesty and corruption into which they’ve sunk. Prior to the war in Iraq they engaged in no due diligence, asked no pertinent questions and demanded no intelligent answers. We’re told that less than a dozen members of Congress even bothered to read the intelligence reports which would have obviated the necessity and questioned the wisdom of fighting this war in the first place.
In Iraq, though it is their direct and explicit job under the Constitution to declare war and then oversee its progress, funding and management; like so many Pilates they quickly washed their hands of all responsibility of the war they so carelessly got us into. After rubberstamping a pack of lies they have still not held an effective debate on the issue even after years of catastrophic failure.
The New Religion of State
To provide additional cover for all their various manipulations and manifold derelictions, while at the same time spreading the corruption around, our two parties have erected a gigantic gothic cathedral of kick back and corruption around them at which they pray every day. This is the new religion of state which is eating away at the foundation of democracy.
Some of these lobbying, support and disinformation groups are euphemistically called “think” tanks which were meant to be an evolution of brain trusts. Trouble is, a think tank that is founded for political and partisan purposes is essentially useless as a creative force and soon becomes little but a shallow jug of propaganda and drum thumping at the center of the wholesale distribution of pre-corrupted ideas. They even dare use real religious piety and pseudo religious zeal as camouflage for their moral malpractice and call it “values” based and family oriented. In this case, apparently “values” means the dollar value for which they may be had. When you combine these groups with attack organizations, disinformation artists, fear and smear political campaigns, partisan talk show hosts and other unethical practitioners of these win at all costs politics you have a compete degradation of the political debate.
In many cases, in intent and structure, these groups are little different, though with modern technology much more powerful and insidious, than the Nazi and Communist propaganda and disinformation machines which are their philosophical predecessors. One has to ask why allegedly impartial politicians paid to work for the interests of all of us would spawn, tolerate and encourage such widespread propaganda and disinformation to be used on their behalf against their own people if not as front to plunder us and to suppress democracy in America.
The definition of a propagandist is someone who isn’t seeking objective truth but only trying to espouse a policy or position, whether right or wrong, to further their own advancement. Our current “think” tanks have replaced political correctness with what might best be termed group-think “stink” tanks for after awhile all their “ideas”, fatally tainted with the same honey pot of corrupt money used to bribe the politicians they support, start to smell pretty much the same. People who work for such organizations are no less corrupt in their intentions than the people they work for and their ideas totally useless in their serviceability to the nation.
These propagandists are the Drain Brains, the lowest common denominator of toxic political waste product, where a witch’s stew of bribes and disinformation is filtered through compliant minds until it exits through the spew pipe of the mouth or onto the page in words. These frightening caricatures of democratic discourse are mounted like grotesque gargoyles on the gothic arches of corruption to frighten all legitimate and reasonable political debate away. Ironically the same groups that originally claimed to be opposed to “political correctness” -defined as a loose societal pressure to do the right things – have replaced it with the thoroughly packaged and contrived political incorrectness of the thoroughly bribed shill and cheat generously paid to do the wrong ones.
Clientocracy versus Democracy
Democracy is an ideal that has proved that the whole of a nation is far greater than the sum of its parts. It’s only when all sides are coherent in their purposes and honest in their intentions that democracy works well (if it is to work at all). Current members of Congress are archenemies of democracy. They have adopted the ethics of bought and paid for, win at any cost trial lawyers. This enables them to work for their special clients against the best interests of the country, all of us in general and, when it suits their venal purposes, even against the Constitution and the law.
Their “client” representation is a pure corruption of their offices and conveniently overlooks the reality that they are hired to serve truth and work for the common good by working for each of us without prejudice or preference. They are meant to be supremely ethical arbiters, fair judges and unbiased determiners of what is best for all in the nation. The current client state mentality of our political class exactly reverses this resolution. This is the fundamental flaw in all their thinking and propaganda.
If all Americans are considered as equal under our law then all Americans must be represented equally. The only possible distinction between Americans one may legitimately draw, the only difference acknowledged by our democracy or present anywhere in constitutional law, is between those who obey the law and those who don’t. Everyone else is as precisely equal legislatively as legally and must be served as such by our political employees.
For any sitting politician who nominally works for each of us to publicly or privately define any alleged difference between “good” and “bad” Americans based on their own bribes, conflicts of interest or personal prejudice is an avowed enemy to the democratic ideals of the state. Yet it has become common among the worst of them to play on our worst instincts and slavishly serve one part of society to use as a club of leverage to selectively oppress the rest of us. To superimpose a winner take all attitude on a system designed to treat everyone equally and fairly is clearly traitorous to the fundamental agreement on which our democracy was established.
In recent memory certain of these political leaders and their followers have routinely proscribed whole subgroups of Americans as not being as good as the rest of us. By routinely demonizing or denigrating whole substrata of honest taxpaying Americans as not worthy of their representation our divide and conquer politicians seek to elevate themselves over us by damning us to division and disunion. By default of our ability to unite against them they seek to aggrandize their own sinecures at our expense.
A short list of Americans they have smeared in recent memory would include: teachers, doctors, union members, the press, the poor, all minorities, immigrants, trial (your) attorneys as opposed to corporate (their) attorneys, people concerned with the destruction of the environment, civil libertarians, scientists, universities, public schools, the judiciary, arts and artists, any dissenting voice, working women, workers in general, the poor, mothers, Hollywood, unapproved religious beliefs or alternative lifestyles or people trying to uphold the constitution and preserve separation of church and state or even citizens who don’t(!) believe in torture or in having their communications monitored by the state; the elderly, anyone standing temporarily in their way or suspiciously intelligent or tolerant, everyone else in the world, etc.
It’s because the whole of America is far greater than the sum of its individual parts, that when they attack one part of the country they attack us all. Of course, minorities they routinely smear without reason. Other groups that are too large to attack directly, like the middle class, they damn with the faint praise of the carnivore for the main course, as a feast to be devoured more slowly and at their leisure.
Even the commonly alleged though entirely disingenuous difference between so-called “good” conservatives and “bad” liberals currently in vogue with certain dishonest politicians today is nothing but a cover for the corruption the distinction is meant to obscure. It’s hardly logical or credible to show your love for a country by professing hate and bigotry at one time or another for nearly all of the people who live in it. To their minds, apparently, America might be a great country but for all the Americans who live here.
All these actions and attitudes display an intentional, predatory desire to undermine the spirit of democracy and natural law and serve as an assault on the core of principles underlying the Constitution. Any public official who pretends to perceive such a distinction between different “types” and subgroups of Americans must hate their country more than they love it, even more than our enemies do. For while opposition from outside may unite us and makes us stronger, corruption and divisions artificially generated from within weaken us irreparably against these same enemies.
Despite the deep theological insights and varied holier than thou pontifications which they claim enables them to make distinctions of moral worth among us, it doesn’t take a genius to discern that the real reason these politicians seek to divide us is not from any patriotic or moral motive (actually opposite these) but for graft and corrupt practices. Despite the money haze of their propagandistic campaigns, once you know where to look it is not really all that difficult to see through to the smirking faces of the crooks crouched behind the façade, manipulating their political puppets with the strings of campaign finance abuse.
In fact it is dismaying to see, in alarming disregard of the facts and their own previously stated opinions, how often all the most deeply held beliefs of these same politicians seem to shift with tides of campaign contributions and the winds of partisan political expediency. They seem to have no fervently held belief one day that may not be for sale the next.
The Garage Sale of Democracy
Instead like primitive idolaters they have found it more expedient to serve money’s golden calf rather than the people’s fatted ones. That means they slavishly chase and serve money wherever it happens to accumulate, generally multi-national organizations, corporations, lobbying and any other (even foreign) interests which, by theological definition, embody no animate souls. These include such disparate entities as big oil (OPEC), defense contractors, the whims and interests of the very, very rich, the social security trust fund, the wealth and savings of the middle class, etc, to see if they can connive to separate us from our savings in order to get their hands on it. Our rich society is the fatted calf of opportunity they see as ripe for sacrifice to the golden idol on the political altars of their corrupt practices.
The individual is the purest essence of democracy and it’s in zealous protection of the rights of each individual that our human rights are ensured as sacrosanct. The true wealth and health of a nation resides unshakably in each one of citizens, not in a few of its conglomerates and corporations. Wealth and prosperity in a democracy must proceed from the people below and progress upwards into its corporations, not the other way around. The wealth and well being of each of its citizens is the necessary aim, not the expendable by product of economic activity.
Conversely, a corporation is merely money institutionalized, and once corporate well being is appreciated over the essential rights of the people, democracy is pulled up by its roots. No soul can be in charge of an institution that is only a loose aggregate of its money grubbing parts and only serves as a clearing house of the bias and greed of others. That Wall Street is doing fine is well and good but to ignore the American economy in favor of the global economy is a clear betrayal of the country.
And yet the rights and prerogatives of such conglomerates are consistently valued by our money sodden politicians over the rights and freedom of individual Americans who actually do compose the source of our laws and comprise the being of our nation. So our profligate politicians live off the hard work of others and collude with large accumulations of capital to plunder the citizenry of their wealth, health and national inheritance. This is the real reason why they seek to ruthlessly corral us into dehumanizing subgroups and pit us against each other in class hatred, religious prejudice and political corruption. Along the way government of, by and for the people becomes government doing to, taking from and working against the very people it is constituted to serve.
A democracy is only as rich as its poorest citizens and as strong as its weakest. But when money becomes your God, as it obviously has done for our political class (and many hypocritically politicized religious leaders) who spend their lives on their knees bowing to its interests while mumbling calming incantations of deceit to the people, then you have stopped serving the people. Promoting commerce and a good and fair economy whether or not it serves the interests of the individuals who comprise the democracy which has fostered the nation’s prosperity denies the underlying humanity and purpose of that same prosperity and despises democracy.
We can only be as free as our public servants keep the operations of their offices. In enslaving themselves to campaign finance abuse they indenture democracy to their own petty and counterproductive activities. When politicians beset with this vacuity of values put themselves for sale it is not just their own souls they are bartering away but the soul of the nation itself.
To add insult to injury, they are selling us off cheap. It may be put forward as a general formulation that a million dollars in campaign bribes spread around Congress will buy a donor a billion dollars in contracts or tax cuts at the expense of the rest of us. Why else would campaign contributions be such a phenomenal growth industry if they didn’t provide an extraordinary return on the investment?
Congress has made itself the garage sale of democracy, the best buy in the country, selling the people out for a pittance. That they would evoke a false front of religious piety to hide their intentions behind, invoke democracy and wrap themselves in the flag is a special kind of hypocrisy. Religious? People who accept the primacy of the moneyed interests over the rights and fairness and ethics of the people they are supposed to serve, love no God and are neither religious nor democratic nor American.
Slush Funds, War Chests and Campaign Finance Abuse
The greatest betrayal our political class has bestowed on the people may lie in the corruption of democracy itself. The protectors of democracy have become its enemies. It is the central responsibility of our political employees to preserve, protect and maintain the vibrancy of our democracy. Yet today, incumbent politicians are the only true predators and natural enemies of democracy in the country. To a small and frightened mind even a small problem becomes titanic. So when seen through small, frightened incumbent minds, free and fair elections become just another threat to their job security. This natural tendency of the worst among them to protection, profiteering and self aggrandizement must be constantly fought and overcome. Historically we have achieved this via the bulwark of the capacity, ethics, patriotism and selflessness of the people we send to Washington, trusting them to keep the nation’s interests ahead of their own.
Unfortunately, today we are not blessed with such politicians. Like termites they have eaten away at the structural integrity of our democracy from within. We cannot legitimately be called a democracy today. More accurately our government has become a clientocracy in service of a plutocratic oligarchy.
The arteries of our democracy have been intentionally calcified to near sclerosis by the incessantly self-serving practices of our incompetent political physicians. In any given year less than 10% of our heavily gerrymandered national offices are even remotely competitive. 99% of all Americans have been priced out of their own democracy and precluded from participation in it. Voting in our elections is at an all time low and dropping and the voting tallies themselves have become increasingly subject to manipulation. Of course public distrust of democracy serves the interests of incumbents perfectly by decreasing voter participation through increasing voter apathy. These trends destroy accountability and have noticeably diminished the quality, intelligence, diligence and honesty of the people we do get in office. This in turn encourages all these negative anti-democratic trends to converge and multiply.
Rampant, unrestrained campaign finance abuse is the crime that keeps on corrupting. It is a double edged sword because even at the beginning it cheats us twice. The theory of some that bribery (defined as large accumulations of campaign contributions from a single or institutional source) if equally engaged in between two opposing parties will somehow work out into a kind of good deriving from a balancing accumulation of evils is a bald absurdity on its face.
In any local township meeting it is understood that conflicts of interest invariably corrupt all the deliberations and conclusions which flow from the proceedings. That’s why such conflicts of interest are shunned and members voluntarily recuse themselves from deliberations rather than proceed with even the appearance of having such conflicts.
Today the Congress of the United States is unique in our democracy. It is the only deliberative body in the country that not only routinely allows such conflicts of interests to exist but to flourish and compound. Each member of Congress wakes up everyday groveling on their knees openly seeking to acquire the very conflicts which basically destroy their ability to properly do their jobs. Seeking conflicts of interest has become so integral and time consuming to them that it has actually come to eclipse the time they spend doing the essential work we are paying them to do. That they then insist that these conflicts have no influence on the votes they cast and the legislation they write is only reinforces the sense we have of their innate dishonesty and bad intentions.
We really only ask two things of our elected officials:
(1) to preserve, protect and defend the democratic institutions we have placed into their care and
(2) to oversee the honest, fair and efficient day to day management of the nation’s business.
With campaign finance abuse our political class consistently betrays our trust on both counts. Along the way they have clearly exempted themselves from the basic ethical standards the rest of us adhere to everyday.
First, corrupt fund raising practices totally subvert the legislative calm and the far-sighted deliberative process of government. It walls them off from the best interests of the people, puts them in the pockets of those that would cheat us and does irreversible harm to the long term interests of the country.
Second, once this money is accumulated into massive campaign slush funds, it is applied by the political class to mute and mutate the electoral process of our democracy. It not only helps incumbents keep their jobs (as opposed to helping them do their jobs) no matter how bad a job they do, but is a clear negative indication of how corrupt a politician is, i.e. the larger the campaign war chest, the more worthless and bought and paid for they are. As no challenger has honest access to such large amounts of capital (given in direct exchange for political influence that only an incumbent has to sell) this automatically frees the incumbent from most electoral competition as it prices democracy out of the reach of any real American who would choose to run against them. This is how the interests of the bribers and the bribed coincide and in that dovetailing our democracy is corrupted beyond recognition. Today our democracy is a faint caricature of how it was intended to be.
A system of free and fair elections is the indispensable wellspring of democracy. When they are corrupted at the source, like a putrid hog wallowing in a spring, then everything which flows from them will be polluted as well. Our elections now prohibit our best candidates from office and encourage our worst. Even sporadic public voter revolts against such a system seldom result in real change. This is due to the endemic, front loaded corruption of a system which ensures that any challenger must be nearly as beholden to corrupt influences as the discredited crook or incompetent they are replacing.
The totality of this means that the very barriers our political class hides behind while they victimize us have been constructed on the ruins of the free and fair democracy they were hired to defend. Feeling secure behind their marbled walls, believing we can only marginally hold them accountable for their disservice, our political class grows more grotesquely unresponsive to the needs of democracy and disrespectful of their offices day by day.
By this time far too many of our officials treat the honored offices they hold not as an honor and privilege or an opportunity to serve their country but as a glorified apprenticeship, a stepping stone to sell us out while enriching themselves at taxpayer expense. They busy themselves with doing as little work as necessary, getting away with as much as possible and lining their pockets as much as they can in the interim. Meanwhile they eagerly anticipate the real money they will subsequently make later in the private sector from the same people they are allowing to bribe them today.
The Reformation of Democracy
We deserve and have always received much better than this in Washington. Our current political class has no ideals, no love of country, no ethics and believe the country exists to serve their interests rather than consider themselves to be servants of the people. By evidence of their record these politicians are the weakest and worst we have ever known. Never in our history have so few been bribed with so little to sell out so many so comprehensively. They do this unrepentantly.
The result of all these corrosive activities is that the last fifty years have seen a steady decline in the stature and place of the United States in the world. The tendencies are escalating and will not reverse of their own. In areas of quality of life like education and health care in which we were world leaders we have become also-rans. Our economy is being systematically gutted, dismantled and sold off for parts while every job in the country (including yours) is currently being offered to the lowest bidders overseas. None of this is due to lack of will or hard work or ethics or genius or drive of the American people but to the congenital failure and mindless corruption of our politicians.
Their unprecedented demagoguery, the divisions they have intentionally driven between us, the massive deficit, their hypocritical assaults on separation of church and state, the endemic corruption they practice, the day to day incompetence and waste and duplicity, the unjust wars, the corrupt tax code, the assaults on freedom at home and abroad and the hates these engender, and the destruction of democratic resiliency at home through the debilitation of our electoral process, are all indices of the worst politicians in the history of the nation and are all signs of a nation in decline. Ethically there is no leash long enough to restrain them. They have already lowered the bar of their own moral standards to a nearly unmeasurable minimum and yet many manage to trip over even these.
Even the welcome corrective change enacted in the recent mid-term elections do not represent anything but reform around the edges. As control of Congress changes hands from one party to another nothing anyone either has said or are likely to do will overhaul the slow, systemic spiraling process of decline our two political parties have set us upon. Soon after the optimism fades and the few long overdue superficial changes are made, stalemate and decline will set in again and continue apace. Structurally our two warring parties have much more in common than either would like to admit.
This government instituted to serve its people no longer adequately does. Yet its leaders are thoroughly, gloriously, callously, unrepentantly, obliviously entrenched. They have become incapable (even if they so wished) to adequately reform themselves or go quietly. Simple change of party control of Congress is not nearly enough. Our political parties must change their attitudes, raise their work and ethical standards to a much higher level and completely transform the way they go about our business. We need a complete Congressional overhaul as a basis to begin a true Democratic Reformation and reinstitute pursuit of a much higher standard of excellence if our political leaders are to reverse the decline they have carelessly engineered.
It is a test of the intelligence of the nation to see through the deceptions our politicians create, recall our honored past and unite to throw the dividers out. It will take nothing less than a revolution to overhaul our political institutions by means of the very same democratic institutions our political class has worked so ceaselessly hard the last fifty years to corrupt. It has been 11 score 10 since our founding, it is time long past due to retool and reengineer our political processes to carry us into the new millennium, not to reinvent a government but to rediscover and reenergize the old one that’s been forgotten and betrayed.
