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BS ‘n’ About…
Re-Democritizing America
America is a lot of things these days, but contrary to what we tell ourselves, a democracy isn’t one of them. By definition, a democracy is a form of government whereby ‘We, the People’ elect representatives who then champion our interests as they govern. In 21st Century America, the divide that separates We’ the People from those who govern us is so great that there is no longer anyone championing our cause.
Take the 2008 Presidential election, for example. Our vote for Obama was a vote against both McCain and Hillary, against both the Republicans and the Democrats. It was a vote against everything Washington: “Yes, We can!”
We could have sworn we voted for the guy who was going to get us out of the war, close Guantanamo, quit giving our hard-earned tax dollars to the Wall Street fatcats, and punish those who may have broken the law under the previous regime. Combined with the 2006 congressional elections, we thought for sure we had made a pretty loud statement for change. Foolish us! That’s not how it works anymore. The unfortunate truth is: “No, We can’t!”
“The banks are too big to fail.” “The war is to vital to withdraw.” “The lawbreakers are too powerful to confront.”
Partisanship has destroyed democracy in America. When every vote splits along party lines it means that rich Hollywood movie star districts are voting the exact same Democratic agenda as poor Detroit unemployed auto worker districts. It means that rich Westchester investment banker districts are voting the exact same Republican agenda as poor Mississippi sharecropper districts. No matter how Rush Limbaugh or Keith Olbermann spins it, this is not democracy by any definition of the word.
While We, the People are pitted against each other as Democrat versus Republican fifty-two percent majorities, Washington seems to keep chugging along with the same old agenda and powerbrokers. While they stir up our red versus blue disunity, Washington remains united in stealing more and more of our green.
“Beware the Military-Industrial complex.”
Within one long generation the wealth of our nation has been stolen from us and accumulated in the hands of a greedy few. The oil companies, defense contractors, insurance companies, and investment bankers are living a Louis XIV lifestyle while we‘re reduced to buying cake with food stamps. We are not freeloaders: We are the children of parents and grandparents who trudged off to the mills, mines, and factories and built this great country of ours, who turned us into the greatest economic and cultural power this world has ever known.
In 2008, when faced with the biggest economic meltdown since the Great Depression, Washington rushed to their aid, not ours. The stock market rebounds while we sit here out of work. The stock market rebounds because we sit here out of work. Does that sound like elected representatives championing the cause of those who actually voted them into office? Does that sound like Democracy?
I’m guessing that We, the people don’t want to be bailing out incompetent banking billionaires. …nor funding five hundred dollar hi-tech military toilet seats. I’m guessing we don’t want to be shipping our jobs to China, nor our kids to Iraq. I’m guessing we don’t want a whole lot of the things we’re bending over and holding our ankles and getting these days.
Unfortunately, absolute power corrupts absolutely. The perks of Washington are so enticing and addictive that a politician is willing to cut any corner, tell any lie, sell out to anything that will keep him there. His constituency’s and the country’s best interests be damned! Spending other peoples’ money is a helluva job if you can get it.
Not all that long ago our jobs were secure, our mortgages were secure, and our retirements were secure. We had healthcare, money in the bank, and enough left over to send the kids to college. The dollar was secure. Our lives were secure. We were the undisputed, no-doubt-about-it Good Guys of this world.
Not all that long ago our political process was controlled by local political bosses, from Mayor Daley’s Chicago stretching back to New York’s Tammany Hall. While far from a perfect system, it was a system with boots on the ground out here in the neighborhoods in which we live and work. Mayor Daley was a powerbroker of national significance, yet he owed that power to the people of Chicago, actual people whose livelihoods depended on his machinations. …actual people who went into a voting booth and cast a vote. It was a political machine whose downfall came about because in the late ‘70’s it couldn’t get the snow removed from the streets of the neighborhoods where those voters actually lived and worked.
These days a candidate for Washington office can run his entire campaign from fundraising dinners and corporate retreats, television studios and PR firms. He crafts a spin-doctored campaign around words and issues someone else wrote for him: inflammatory social issues, mud-slinging at his opponent, and a nice catchy lie of a slogan. …none of which have anything to do with the actual job we are electing him to do.
As an officeholder he owes us, those who actually voted him into office, no allegiance. His allegiance is to those who funded his warchest. The day after the election the signs come down, the campaign offices in our neighborhoods close, and he flies back to Washington in some special interest corporate jet.
If we need something, we can always e-mail him there, but keep it under fifty words. He’s a busy man. He’ll get back to us when he can, probably in the guise of one of his fundraisers just before the next election. Democracy in Information Age America…
As long as We, the People continue to allow our lunch money to be stolen, we’re going to continue going without lunch. The rich will get richer. We will get poorer. When it all falls apart, they will flee to their private overseas retreats and we will be left here among the rubble. And that great vision with which our Founding Fathers formed this nation will be consigned to the dustbin of history.
We need to quit hating on our neighbor. We need to start paying attention and reading between the lines. We need to quit rolling over and playing dead every time they wag the dog.
It’s not a red versus blue thing. Really: It’s not. Sadly, it has become an us versus them thing, a have versus have-not thing. Look at history. Every time that great wealth has been taken out of the hands of the many and concentrated in the hands of the few, it has turned into an us versus them thing. Every time!
Our leaders aren’t bad guys. For the most part they mean well, even if it is often in a greedy, self-serving way. They aren’t overly corrupt. They are just human. It is the system that is corrupt. The inertia of greed that drives us won’t be easy to curtail. The culture of cheating that seems to pervade every aspect of American life won’t be overcome overnight. We have become a people without charity, compassion, or honor.
So where do we start? The abolition of political parties would be a big first step in the right direction. We have created monsters and they are devouring our Constitution. They have become big, unwieldy, self-serving bureaucracies whose only vision is the furtherance of their own power. Any connection they may have once had with the American citizen, the American voter, has been severed. We, the People no longer need them. They are dinosaurs run amok, threatening everything we hold sacred.
The Internet changes everything. The fifty layers of spin doctors, image consultants, and speechwriters between us and our candidates threaten our very democracy: The packaging and handling that went into making Sarah Palin ‘ready for prime time’ was an insult to both her and us. Put her in a chat room and let her interact with We, the People in real time about the real issues that are important to us. Let her write a daily blog without fifty handlers looking over her shoulder. Let her and the rest of the candidates be themselves and trust us, the American people, to make the right choice about what is best for America.
The money necessary to run a campaign these days is as responsible as anything for the downfall of democracy in America. The Lincolns, Lyndons, and Trumans would have almost no chance of being elected these days. They’ve been squeezed out by the Schwarzenneggers, Whitmans, and Bloombergs.
Yet a campaign, even a national presidential campaign, should cost virtually nothing these days. When the particular aroma of every Brangelina fart gets debated ad nauseum in half the media of the world, why exactly do our candidates think they need to spend hundreds of millions to get their message out to the voters? Perhaps to mask the fact that they have no message?
And the best way to do this is to focus all the voters’ attention on what a dirtbag their opponent is with millions of dollars worth of attack ads. Whole campaigns are waged these days without ever addressing the actual nuts-and-bolts of what the candidate is going to do for us once elected. The 2000 election revolved around what each candidate was going to do with all that surplus once elected. Remember? And 2004 gave us the debate about what one guy did forty years ago in Vietnam, who the other guy paid off to not go at all, and whether gay people should be allowed to get married. None of this bullshit had a damn thing to do about the actual job we were electing them to do: Not a word about Wall Street’s shaky foundation, nor the mortgages being sold us that we couldn’t afford, nor sending our kids off to a war we didn’t understand.
A candidate these days can’t take the risk of actually taking a stand on anything he might have to live up to once elected. Obama probably came the closest and he’s getting killed for it. The Democrats and Republicans won’t be making that mistake again anytime soon, that’s for damn sure.
We, the People need to quit allowing the rich guys to buy the elections. In a democracy, the pendulum swings back and forth between liberal and conservative, depending on the needs of the nation at the time. In the ‘30’s FDR ushered in a liberal era after conservative business interests led to the Great Depression and the very rending of the fabric of society. After forty years of rebuilding the devastated middle class into an educated, hard-working citizenry built on security and family values, FDR liberalism was doing more harm than good by the late ‘70’s.
Reagan ran for office and he was honest with the voters about what he felt needed to be done. He told the “me” generation that it was time to tighten their belts, pitch in and work together to make America strong again. He promised us that if we gave the rich guys our money they would use it to rebuild our crumbling infrastructure, workplaces, and reputation around the world. He promised us that, if we did our part, the benefits would “trickle-down”.
He was naïve.
Once the rich guys got hold of the money, they didn’t use it to rebuild our manufacturing base. They didn’t use it to rebuild our infrastructure. They didn’t use it to rebuild our schools, hospitals, or neighborhoods. No. They used to play stock market derivative roulette, creating one bursting bubble after another, each one concentrating more and more of our money in their hands.
When our jobs and families were strong, America was strong. Within a generation, the American ship of state has so badly run aground that we are willing to accept second-nation status to China, the great majority of which is barely out of the Stone Age. …The Chinese Century. Bah humbug! You’ve got to be kidding!
What happened? How did we lose our way, seemingly overnight?
Modern communications technology has perverted our political process, creating unnatural forces that have hindered the natural swing of the democratic pendulum. Had that pendulum been swinging democratically, perhaps we could have avoided this latest greed-induced Wall Street financial meltdown. Perhaps we could have avoided funding two wars with our grandkids college money. Perhaps we’d still be making the things we need here instead of buying them from China. Perhaps we could have avoided being viewed by the world as torturers and concentration camp commandants. Perhaps.
Not that long ago we tuned into Walter Cronkite and got a ‘fair and balanced’ telling of the news. They reported and we decided. Opinion didn’t masquerade as fact. Editorial didn’t masquerade as news. Networks hadn’t sold their soul to one political party or the other. There was separation between politics and the media. There was separation between church and state. Not that long ago we were a ‘kinder and gentler’ nation built upon ‘family values’. Not that long ago we were a civilized people and the future looked promising.
These days our airwaves are filled with Murdoch-sponsored hatred masked as entertainment, parading itself as news. When a billionaire pays a millionaire to get you to hate your neighbor, you can be pretty damn sure that the end result will be in the best interests of the billionaire and the millionaire, not you, nor your neighbor.
Radio in heartland America seems to have only one viewpoint, most of it sponsored by one ‘unfair and unbalanced’ rich guy who has no vested interest in the future of a country built by our ancestors, not his. When virtually every election is split 55/45, doesn’t it feel just plain wrong the political discourse on the radio is split 90/10? That’s not democracy. That’s America.
The hatred and vitriol spewed on talk radio these days might sell a lot of advertising, but it does not present a ‘fair and balanced’ reflection of who and what we are as a people. Fear sells but is doing great damage to the American way of life by giving way too much power to the crazies out on the fringe. Radio is out of control in America, a totally partisan abuse of everything the First Amendment stands for, everything democracy stands for, everything America used to stand for.
Radio needs to be a local phenomena, reflecting the views and needs of the local community in which it is broadcasting. It would create jobs, allow viewpoints to be heard, and go a long way toward re-democritizing America. It’s how radio used to work back in the days when America still worked.
The bombast and sensationalism necessary to capture and hold a national radio audience results in a political discourse with all the integrity of the National Enquirer. Facts get distorted. Hatreds get stirred up. The stupidest among us end up running America: “Golly gee! She just like me!”
Re-Democritizing America is going to require the combined efforts of all of us, not to mention a Constitutional Convention or two. The first step will be acknowledging that we have a need. The second will be finding the national will to overcome the forces of inertia and greed which will resist the effort.
It will require drastically reducing the power and influence of the political parties and the rabid partisanship that they engender, not to mention the monied-interests that have bought and paid for them. It will require changing the way political campaigns are funded and run, Supreme Court notwithstanding.
We need to quit giving the almighty dollar final say in our political process. We need to bring the Internet into the equation in a way that reestablishes the connection between politician and voter, representative and representee.
We need to change the way our lawmakers are compensated, providing incentive to spend our money as if it were their own. We need to outlaw the lobbyists and remove them from the legislation-writing process. We need our representatives to actually read the bills they vote for, therefore we need to simplify them so that they can be understood not only by our legislators, but also by us. After all, we are supposed to be partners in this process, aren’t we?
We need to do something about attack ads and put the brakes on hate radio. We need to become a ‘kinder and gentler’ nation again. We need to become ‘fair and balanced’ again. We need to put the red versus blue bullshit aside and become the United States of America again.
When our Founding Fathers realized that this great nation of theirs wasn’t living up to the lofty expectations they had for it, they had the good sense to call a Constitutional Convention and work together to get it back on track. These days we can’t seem to be united in anything but name anymore, but we ought to be united in seeing that the system is broke and needs fixing. …United in seeing that our democracy is in danger. United we stand. Divided we’re falling.
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