“Government by organized money is just as dangerous as government by organized mob.”
—Franklin Delano Roosevelt
The country is no longer what it claims to be—a nation of hope and prosperity for all, a nation with Justice For All. The problem is the same as it has always been: Money flows upward and gets concentrated, corrupting everything, while leaving the majority behind. We’ve let the bastards take control again. The bastards being organized money. As FDR said:
“The liberty of a democracy is not safe if the people tolerate the growth of private power to a point where it becomes stronger than their democratic state itself. That, in its essence, is fascism—ownership of government by an individual, by a group.
“We had to struggle with the old enemies of peace—business and financial monopoly, speculation, reckless banking, class antagonism, sectionalism, war profiteering. They had begun to consider the government of the United States as a mere appendage to their own affairs. We know now that government by organized money is just as dangerous as government by organized mob. Never before in all our history have these forces been so united against one candidate as they stand today. They are unanimous in their hate for me—and I welcome their hatred.”
We now have Republicans and Democrats ignoring Roosevelt’s wisdom and have effectively repealed the New Deal. We are right back to the same place we were in 1936. The difference is that, back then, we had FDR to push back against the bastards, now we have someone pushing with the bastards.
Barack Obama does not, nor do many Democrats, “welcome their hate.” In fact, most of them fear their hate because they “welcome their money” in the form of campaign donations.
And that’s the problem: The plutocrats have effectively gamed the system by BUYING IT and rewriting the rules to serve themselves. Which is why we are now living in a new Gilded Age. Remember that Mark Twain referred to the Gilded Age as a time when serious social problems were hidden by a “thin gold gilding.”
The antidote for these problems should be the Fourth Estate—the supposed watchdogs of our society. Our free press is so important, it is one of only three professions mentioned in the Constitution.
But there aren’t any watchdogs anymore because they put them in the kennel. Not all at once, but slowly and very deliberately. CEOs of corporations and the heads of banks (aka criminals) have always bought our politicians to help get the rules rigged in their favor.
It used to be the role of the Fourth Estate to monitor our politicians and their donators. But the criminals got smart and decided to buy the watchdog, too.
Now there is nobody watching the store, and the dog has been hired by the very criminals they are supposed to be watching.
They’ve even made a mockery of the judicial system. Remember the last time a candidate with fewer votes was appointed president by the Supreme Court?
Justice Stevens wrote a scathing dissent on the Court’s ruling to stay the recount of votes in Florida during the 2000 presidential election. He believed that the holding displayed:
“an unstated lack of confidence in the impartiality and capacity of the state judges who would make the critical decisions if the vote count were to proceed.
“The endorsement of that position by the majority of this Court can only lend credence to the most cynical appraisal of the work of judges throughout the land. It is confidence in the men and women who administer the judicial system that is the true backbone of the rule of law. Time will one day heal the wound to that confidence that will be inflicted by today’s decision. One thing, however, is certain. Although we may never know with complete certainty the identity of the winner of this year’s presidential election, the identity of the loser is perfectly clear. It is the Nation’s confidence in the judge as an impartial guardian of the rule of law.”
And that is the same court that went on to rule in the Citizens United case, which decided that corporations can spend as much corporate money on political campaigns as they want, revealing that the true owners of the country are the ones with the most money. They now spend the cash to get their puppet elected, and then the puppet votes to give them even more power and rigs the game even more in the plutocrats’ favor.
This isn’t news to anyone; it’s just information that never gets discussed when and where it should be being discussed . . . which is all the time, everywhere.
We are living with the consequences of these decisions now. We are now seeing the biggest income disparity in our country since the Gilded Age. Corporate profits are back to record highs, and the banks are bigger and richer than ever, thanks to the taxpayers. And yet most Americans are barely treading water in the richest country in the world.
It’s the corporatization of our entire culture. We have let unbridled, unregulated capitalism become religious dogma that never gets questioned. We are now privatizing everything, including education.
We are constantly being told (by the paid tools in the corporate media) that teachers are really the greedy ones in our culture, and they are lazy and your kid would be getting a better education if we just let a corporation do it.
What that means is privatizing education, taking it from being a state service with professional workers dedicated to education and giving it to private corporations who are dedicated to turning a profit.
And the data is in: They don’t work. Four out of five charter schools perform neither better nor worse than the public schools they want to replace. And that’s after they broken the teachers union, gotten rid of the most experienced teachers, and discouraged other quality people from entering the profession, because we now have a system that views teachers as “the problem.”
The way out of this is going to have to come from us, from our organizing, from massive protests like Occupy Wall Street, and from enough people raising their voices.
America is progressive.
Americans are progressive.
Most of us believe in a fair playing field for all, and that everybody who works should share in our increased prosperity. Most Americans embrace modern-day Liberalism. How do I know that? That’s what they were voting for when they voted for Barack Obama, who very cleverly campaigns as a populist and a liberal. Unfortunately, he quickly disowned that ideology when in power, enjoying hanging out with the likes of Larry Summers and Robert Rubin.
The only solution is the obvious one: We need to turn the country back over to the people and the people who are responsive to the people. The only way to do that is: Get the money out of politics.
We can’t do anything until we get that done. Ironically, it appears that we need to raise a shit ton of money to do that.