Can the American Political Process Result in Real Leadership?
A friend who favors right-wing ideologies sent me a video in which the Cato Institute ripped up Obama’s State of the Union Address, pointing out certain claims as lies – even challenging the legality of some of the actions he’s taken as president. While I’m not a huge fan of the Cato Institute, they’re no fools, and they certainly make some good points here. Let’s also admit that Obama has been a bitter disappointment, as millions of us realized that he’s just another politician, put in place with huge money (in this case, Big Pharma and Wall Street) to protect and expand these interests.
But I’m always astounded when intelligent people believe that one of these two political parties is right and the other wrong. When Romney or Gingrich speak, is it even remotely possible to imagine that they are sincerely interested in anything other than your vote? Or that they have a credible plan to put a space station on the moon (an American one, of course), or to power the world with nuclear energy, or close down the EPA, or “kill our enemies” – does any of this make real sense?
OK, if that didn’t annoy you, try this: What did the Cato Institute say when ex-CIA director George Tenet admitted that the most senior levels of the G. W. Bush administration launched their war against Iraq based upon false pretenses and manipulated intelligence? This isn’t a mere difference of ideology about healthcare or unemployment or debt ceiling limits. These are war crimes – you know what I mean — the types of things for which people in other parts of the world are brought to justice, then hanged or shot.
I’m amazed that well-educated people can hold on so tenaciously to ideas that either one of these two political parties, in a process that is so overtly corrupt, can save the world, while the other is the route to hell. Sorry if I’ve insulted anyone here, but I find the notion ridiculous.
While the vast majority of Democrats regard liberty, equality, fraternity, and environmental sustainability as fine concepts, there are a great many among the leadership who have concluded that – in the modern age of the open corporate financing of elections – the task of enacting law to secure all of these as realities for all citizens now amounts to political suicide.
These leaders have therefore apparently concluded that the greater good of the population must be sacrificed upon the altar of a fiscally expedient campaign, and that the goal of a better tomorrow for our children is yesterday’s casualty in the teeth of cruel ‘political realities’.
For Democratic leaders, corporate and personal bribery (campaign contributions) are accepted as a necessary evil that cannot be easily dispensed with – indeed, easy money in exchange for “access” has become an addiction too powerful to break without intervention. Local-interest infighting works to prevent a coherent national strategy.
As a result of these and other challenges, the cherished power of the people is often manipulated and diminished, not enhanced, under Democratic leadership.
Traditionally, Republicans have espoused views that would prove quite favorable to progress and stability – examples are: fiscal responsibility; localized authority; preservation of personal freedom; and the view that a republic’s elected legislature should represent the people.
Yet many in this party also assert that the government is best which governs least. By engendering a broad and blanket rejection of the government’s organization of vital services and of its supervision of corporate power, this assertion has resulted in America’s position falling far down the list in terms of infant mortality, clean air, water and food standards, as well as public access to medical care and higher education. We are now also no longer near the top in terms of average standard of living.
While many Republicans champion the principle that government should stay out of private life, exceptions have come to include what people do in their bedrooms, with their bodies, in their libraries, with their money, what they discuss with their doctors, and who they marry.
Among Republicans there is observed a general resistance to taxation – except for that which pays for military spending and police, and perhaps fire protection. The notions that universal education and single payer healthcare are a waste of money still persist, in spite of the proof of their lasting benefits to greater society, and their higher efficiency – as has been shown in this country and across the ‘developed’ nations of the world.
It is also the aim of many in the party leadership and the rank and file that the law of the jungle should operate in civilized society (with notable exceptions being the encouragement of powerful monopolies as the final result of consolidated capital, and the suppression of the collective bargaining powers of organized labor). Implicit is the tenet that the powerful and wealthy should dictate the standard of living of the humble poor.
Additionally, corporate and personal bribery (campaign contributions) are considered the equivalent of free speech, making certain that under the GOP wealthy voices will remain palpably more ‘persuasive’. It has been observed that ExxonMobil, with just a fraction of 1% of its profits in a single year, can now buy a presidential election outright.
Even so, the initial enthusiasm many in the GOP leadership showed to the Citizens United vs. FEC decision was quickly tempered by their realization that the GOP rank and file (like the rest of the citizenry) thought it a very bad idea.
An article in the September issue of Hightower’s Lowdown (edited by former Texas Secretary of Agriculture Jim Hightower) perceptively notes that the vast sums in America’s corporate treasuries do not belong to the heads of the corporations, and are therefore not theirs to pump into politicians’ palms.
This Hightower’s Lowdown publication also reminds us that, for about seventy years after our nation was founded, each corporation was granted its charter – on pain of dissolution for any violation – under the following criteria: To maintain and adhere to a genuine purpose of public benefit; To limit itself to its original business concern, abstain from purchasing other corporations, and amass only a specified maximum of wealth; To exist for a nominal term of 20 years before applying to the legislature for renewal; To deal equitably with trading partners and competition. And – pointedly – these companies were prohibited from lobbying, and from influencing any political campaigns. Our best founders were as wary of the power of corporations as they were of military ascendancy.
Additionally, Hightower’s Lowdown recalls the little-known fact that these fraudulent corporate attempts to demand the rights of persons under law all hearken back to a completely unauthorized entry in the summary of a single Supreme Court case, Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad in 1886. A certain Mr. J. C. Bancroft Davis, a court reporter employed by a private publisher of legal documents, made a legally baseless assertion when he errantly opened his summary with this unfounded statement: “The defendant Corporations are persons within the intent of the clause in Section 1 of the 14th Amendment…” (Back in 1868, the 14th Amendment had granted former slaves equal protection under the law.)
Although the railroad lawyers had attempted to persuade the court to create legal personhood for corporations, the justices resolutely excluded any such verdict on the subject by the court. Neither has any declaration by Congress ever established or recognized any merit to any firm’s claim to possess the legal rights of “natural persons”.
Anyone who will examine with an unbiased mind the ever increasingly un-republican and un-democratic workings of those sad affairs of state we call ‘our government’ will readily see the most pressing concern that faces every patriotic American today: the pocketing of our “public servants” by corporate and other moneyed interests. There is no other issue that holds at its base so many aspects of societal and technical progress and civic integrity. As a result, it’s a fatefully venomous influence on the future of humankind.
Our government was established with many precious ideals; chief among these are the equality of all persons before the law, impartial justice, equitable representation, the promotion of the general welfare, and the consent of the governed. Our right to choose between candidates and issues, and cast our votes and have them counted, is one of the most basic features of our republic – and as a direct result of civil disobedience, this vital birthright has been quite justly expanded to include all races and both genders.
However, this cherished right to vote is being virtually nullified by the deluge of money pouring into our campaign processes, so that all our elections are decided not by ideas, but by the enormous sums that the nominees and ballot measures receive from “interested parties” – and the resulting airtime and print-space that currency buys.
Our legislative processes are likewise poisoned with massive injections of formalized bribery, politely labeled “lobbying”. While any dispassionate analysis plainly reveals the skull and bones warning hidden by that convenient label, the US Supreme court has recently likened all this bribery to free speech …in other words, they decided that affluent mouths have a legal right to shout while plain folks whisper.
Republicans and Democrats alike unleashed Wall Street’s toxic “derivatives” and emptied our Treasury into the sucking vaults of the banksters, and both parties alike continue to handicap our economy and hamstring our businesses by shutting out any real discussion of the single-payer healthcare the majority of Americans (and of American doctors and nurses) fully support – and which efficiently delivers high quality medical services to all the people in every other advanced nation across the globe. Meanwhile, in the name of profit, the drug pushing “free press” consolidated itself into willful muteness.
From the pigheaded neglect of fuel efficiency, plug-in hybrids and alternative energy – and the irrational rejection of responsible stewardship for all the dwindling natural capital that sustains us – to barriers against prescription drugs from Canada and the patently lethal subversion of the FDA by our own drug companies as the revolving door spins between boardroom and agency, this misguided money madness has bought and sold injustice and death among ourselves and our grandchildren.
From horserace “news” coverage of dumbed-down campaigns to those fork-tongued promises and ‘issue ads’ that mock public service, avarice continues to accomplish its pervasive evils. Wealth, and not wisdom, greed, and not greatness, wins and will keep winning the day.
We now genuinely reside under the best democracy/hypocrisy that this money can buy… and as long as We the People allow cash to reign as king over our government, our beloved America will only get worse.
When contemplating taxation (AKA investment in national infrastructure, education, etc.), it is useful to keep in mind that individuals are taxed on their REVENUE, while corporations are taxed merely on their PROFIT!
Just imagine if you could pay tax only on your “profit” – that is, only pay tax on that amount left over after food, shelter, clothing, insurance, medical expenses, and childcare.
Back in the widely prosperous 1950’s, our nation’s corporations paid 76 cents for every dollar paid in federal taxes by individuals. The top individual tax rate was 90%!
Yet, in the “lean and mean” 1990’s (a decade of flattened average personal incomes and record stock gains and profits for US businesses), the nation’s corporations paid only 21 cents for every federal tax dollar paid by private individuals. In 1995, only 11.6% of federal revenues came from corporations.
Can you imagine the leaders of either party supporting, as an alternative, a tax code reduced from its current 4,000-plus pages to the following three sentences:
1) From every single dollar that every individual and every corporate entity receives from the sale of any product, and in exchange for any service and asset, and all income from any investment and any interest on savings, that individual and entity shall pay our Federal Government one thin dime.
2) The first of two exemptions from that requirement shall be granted to each individual and each corporation for an annually revised ‘subsistence income’ equal to half that amount necessary to provide two individuals and two dependents a sufficient quality and quantity of nutrition and clothing, to cover median-level housing and transportation costs, decent child care and quality medical care, as well as adequate retirement savings for two persons.
3) The second and last exemption shall be granted each individual and corporation for any amount (up to the latest annual “subsistence income”) held in savings instruments for at least five years.
Does anyone think a simple, workable, equitable and balanced solution like that will be arrived at while foxes guard the henhouse?
For all these challenges we now face, the solutions are elegantly simple:
a) Grant all qualified candidates for public office equal finding, airtime and print-space;
b) Require them all to participate in lengthy, open and mandatory debates with unfiltered questions from the public;
c) Establish 25-year prison terms for both them and their bribers for any form of private monetary contribution toward their campaigns or while in office.
In other words, remove the influence of money from the political arena.
I’ll close this extended response with two quotes I find particularly applicable…
“Let me now warn you, in the most solemn manner, against the baneful effects of the spirit of party.”
– George Washington
“A bad Judiciary involved in party business is the greatest curse that can befall a country.”
– Andrew Jackson, 1796
Apologies to all for the oversight – the above “Anonymous” comment is my own.