I ask this as a serious question.
One that requires more than a cry for impeachment, or calls for inherent contempt as a response. Or boycotts, more investigations – even total election domination, for that matter (although that would humiliate the republicans and would be oh-so-satisfying in a schadenfreude kind of way).
Pretty much everything is broken. The electoral system, checks and balances, healthcare, the government, our military, infrastructure and any semblance of fairness for at least 75% of the American public. Each day brings more news that is so outrageously disgraceful yet it is met with “just another fucking thing” and a shake of the head.
Where to even begin? What is more important – getting out of Iraq or affordable healthcare for the tens of millions who don’t have it? Election integrity or restoring the Constitution? Keeping the United States adequately protected from natural disasters (let alone terrorism) or reversing the environmental standards that have declined over the past few years? Helping the middle class or dealing with the declining overall health of this country’s citizens or making sure that Medicare will be able to take care of all these people? Fight the lies and hatred of those on the right to shine a light on reality or keep up investigations that will shine a light on the crimes of the past six years but will probably not result in the removal of anyone from office?
You get the picture. The foul rotten stench of modern day republicans and its alliance with corporate money as well as fundamentalism and neoconservatism has so thoroughly permeated this country’s culture, economy and government that nothing short of a full house cleaning would do the job of ridding this cancer from America’s system. The healthcare industry, Fox News, partisan convicted criminals or idiots passing for “pundits” or experts. Our electoral system, Justice Department, judiciary, K Street and Wall Street. $1,000,000 entry fee just to run for Congress (a pretty big number), a tax system rigged towards the lucky and insanely wealthy. And so on.
There is a crisis of unimaginable levels emerging here – as a result of just about every decision (most of them willful) over the past seven years and much planning in the previous ten years or so. It is a cancer on this country, a cancer that has grown and spread. Every area is important – and there are many more areas which need addressing. I’d love to see Gonzales impeached. But what will it do in terms of his Justice Department anyway?
There has to be more to hope for than we better not fucking bomb or invade Iran. That shouldn’t be a wish. That should be a given. But with the way that some Democratic candidates are talking, even that isn’t a given if we see a Democratic President in 2008 (I’m just sayin…).
Obviously, all of the things mentioned above are of utmost importance. Do we want a republican President to have all of the powers that the Bush administration usurped gave to themselves? Hell, do we even want a Democratic President to have these powers? Unless there was an expiration date on the Executive Orders, that is a reality. Of course, all children should be able to get healthcare and elections shouldn’t be rigged from the inside.
I don’t have answers to many of these questions. I have ideas on how to do some things, but even if I (or we) were to come up with the best answers to these issues and questions, how would I (or we) get anyone to listen? Certainly, the “total electoral domination” would be a big help (and a lot of fun). Maybe it is a start. A mediocre Democrat is nearly always better than even the most reasonable of republicans. I’d take either Nelson over Snowe, Collins or Chaffee pretty much every time (but never Holy Joe).
Self-identified “independents” are trending towards these issues in pretty big numbers, but not necessarily always to the Democrats. Even ½ of the “undecided” independents could make 2008 an electoral landslide. Which means that they need to be made aware of the crimes, robbing of the treasury and middle class as well as the hijacking of our Constitution that has been done over the past 7-10 years. Which, I guess, leads back to investigations and countering the lies of the right. And so on and so on and so on.
Some of these are intertwined, and maybe it isn’t as daunting as it seems. And yeah, this may be a bit rambling, but sometimes when you stop to look around, the initial (and most logical) response is, man, things are really fucked up…”
For me, today is one of those days.
also in orange
Seriously, that isn’t a reference to what should be done with republicans, but a fair diagnosis of the situation in the U.S.
Bush and his cabal set out to irreversibly break our system of representative democracy and a regulated free market that has existed in its present form since the Roosevelt Administration (Teddy that is) with the intent of taking us back to the good old days of the gilded age, or perhaps simply feudalism.
And, judging from my last visit back to the U.S. a couple of days ago- they have succeeded. Things are way broken, more so than I thought. Previously I hadn’t really noticed and retained a lot of hope, but now I think I was, like many other Americans, the proverbial frog in the slowly boiling pot of water. With a few months perspective a trip back to America leads me to notice the rapid boil of malaise and systemic failure that is cooking our nation.
What to do? Maybe repeal the Constitution, end the Federal government and let the smart states join Canada or the EU and let the rest go ahead and finalize their descent into Anglophone, protestant recreations of Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s nightmare vision of malaise in the American continents.
Sneaking into the country? How’s Dubai treating you?
“SSSS” on all my boarding passes- must be because of June’s rash of hijackings by Jewish lawyers. Came through Philly for a day on the 13th to do (my last) criminal case and went to Florida to meet the wife and kids on a visit with the in-laws.
See above for what 10 days in Ft. Lauderdale, Orlando and Tampa will do to a person’s assessment of the state of the nation.
Also, apropos of nothing- The recent U.S. arms sales to the Saudis is being coverned in the Gulf states as ‘U.S. forces Gulf States to buy new weapons by arming those f***ing lunatic Saudis”. The UAE, Qatar, Baharain, Kuwait and Oman have militaries designed and postured to defend against the Saudis, not the Iranians. Given that the Saudi response to any move toward democratization or liberalization in the Gulf states is met by Saudi statements that they reserve the right to intervene in their neighbor’s affairs to prevent destabilization of the region (e.g. because the UAE lets women drive and hold jobs, the Saudis might just have to invade or something.)
So, people in Dubai see the Saudis as religious wackos? What do they think of the Mullahs?
Emiratis are by and large pretty observant, orthodox, Sunni Muslims who view the Saudis as a bunch of thuggish crooks running a kleptocracy based on a false front of wahabbi lunacy. The cadres for “promotion of virtue and suppression of vice” are mostly beneficiaries of patronage jobs who get off on beating up women.
The “mullahs” are viewed as trading partners who occasionally pop off with some ludicrous statements (think our very nice mutual friend who, after twenty or so beers, will wander into the streets of the lower east side spouting anti-dominican slurs at 3 a.m.)- while there are some pissing contests over fishing rights and some nice resort islands in the Gulf, none of the Gulf states (except Bahrain with its Shi’ite majority) see them as a threat beyond worrying that a US-Iran war would be bad for business overall.
Very well put. A fair diagnosis, exactly!
And my sense of it, given that 1) the corporate media is part of the “cabal,” and 2) the majority of Americans form their world view based on the disinformation, distortion, and deception that passes for “news” in this country, 3) the majority of Americans aren’t going to get it until they really start to feel the pinch.
And, IMHO, that’s when things could start to get ugly. What’s the solution? I don’t know. I’ve thought about it a lot, but I just don’t know.
My answer is while this cancer is massive and keeps spreading, it’s still treatable. But there’s going to be some ugly side effects, and it’s got to start with some pretty heavy tumor removal work, starting with Gonzo.
Enough digging and the entire house of cards goes down, I figure.
I’m more pessimistic than anyone so far- we need an entire cultural shift, at a time when mass communications are hostile to progressivism.
imho, if we don’t restore the constitution, an effort in which i INCLUDE not only removing the bush administration from power but also rolling back and officially REPUDIATING the levers of unfettered power that they have put in place, NONE of the rest is going to matter… this absolutely MUST be done, btw, BEFORE the next president takes office..
People have a faulty understanding of the motivation of the hallowed “Founding Fathers”. They were in no way committed to a government “of the people, by the people, for the people.” Far from it. The 55 delegates who attended the constitutional convention were virtually without exception members of the economic elite of that period. (You can review their personal biographies here.)
People who have attained wealth and power invariably have a strong motivation to protect and preserve what they have, not to mention enhance and expand it whenever possible. These colonial aristocrats were no exception. As John Jay, the first Chief Justice of the US Supreme Court, put it rather succinctly:
“The people who own the country ought to govern it.
I believe that pretty much summed up the mindset of those who drew up the blueprint under which our government and society operates. The dilemma they faced is not hard to understand. While the upper class to which they belonged unquestionably enjoyed a great financial superiority over ordinary citizens, they were at the same time clearly inferior from a strictly numerical perspective.
The obvious solution was to create a governmental model that gave more weight to economic power than to raw numerical power. This was accomplished not only in how the constitution was written, but also in the manner it was implemented. In fact, in the earliest days of the Republic, only a relatively small sub-set of citizens was even allowed to vote at all. As our history has unfolded, old mechanisms designed to protect the wealth class have been discarded, only to be supplanted by new, and arguably more effective ones.
The essential problem facing the framers was summed up in the following remarks by James Madison, generally recognized as the constitution’s primary architect. And keep in mind that Madison was the leader of the populist faction of the convention delegates.
People have a tendency to believe what it serves their own self-interest to believe. The men who crafted the constitution were certainly not evil. To a large degree they were visionary and idealistic. They merely saw themselves as part of a natural aristocracy, based partly on birthright and partly on merit, whose destiny was to rule benevolently over their lesser brethren, for the mutual benefit of all.
Unfortunately, when political power is so unequally distributed, it’s never a good thing. Power is somewhat like the ballast of a ship. When it’s equally distributed, the ship is stable. When it is overweighted in the bow, a negative dynamic occurs where everything starts sliding forward, and the imbalance becomes progressively worse, until such time as the ship becomes vertical rather than horizontal. I believe we are not too far from that point in America right now.
What our forefathers in fact created was an oligarchy masquerading as a Republic. In this they were not so much different from their counterparts in the republic of ancient Rome. To quote from the Oxford Press:
The further you’re removed from the visionary founders, the more craven, corrupt, brutal and generally dysfunctional an oligarchy typically becomes. This is because the personal attributes that lead to success and domination among members of the aristocracy tend to be antithetical to the interests of the lesser classes. Invariably it is the most ruthless, craven, dishonest and pathological personalities who come to the fore. In Roman times it was individuals such as Caesar, Pompey and Crassus — in the modern age, men like Bush, Cheney and Gonzales are their natural successors.
The whole theory of a benign and benevolent ruling class is based on what I like to call the Fallacy of the Wise Few. This from a very wise and perceptive observation by Gilbert Chesterton:
There are no wise few. Every aristocracy that has ever existed has behaved, in all essential points, exactly like a small mob.
One thing you can say about those founding fathers: They succeeded spectacularly in their aim to protect the minority of the opulent from the uncouth and unwashed majority. Through various provisions embedded within the constitution, through statutory law, judicial interpretation, and practical realities, they have indeed given rise a mighty citadel of privilege, the walls of which no mere plebian can ever hope to scale.
I don’t believe for a millisecond that working through the proscribed mechanisms — fund-raising and registration drives, supporting “progressive” candidates, voter education, get-out-the-vote efforts, and the like — will have the slightest impact in advancing our aspirations for a society based on justice, freedom, equality and brotherhood. The game has long been hopelessly rigged in favor of the Optimates (as the Roman patrician class used to be called), and attempting to beat them at their own game is akin to attempting to beat a casino by playing a crooked roulette wheel.
I’m firmly convinced that the solution, if there is one, lies in making people understand that a new set of rules (i.e., a substantially revised and updated constitution) is required if those fine-sounding words in the pledge of allegiance — “one nation… with liberty and justice for all” — are ever to become anything other than a cynical and empty slogan.
What’s really needed is a united front political advocacy group, modeled perhaps on the African National Congress, to develop a draft of a new constitution, and begin to create an alternate reality in which people can begin to perceive a coherent, viable and superior alternative to the status quo, in terms of the overall rulebook under which our society and government operate.
Of course, many people have correctly pointed out that getting “progressives” to agree on anything, including the time of day or season of the year, is an exercise akin to trying to herd cats. I don’t disagree. But it is that very mentality of extreme individualism and contrariness that our enemies are counting on to ensure that we stay weak, divided and ineffectual, and thus completely irrelevant to the entire debate.
I suppose I’m both an optimist and an idealist at heart — otherwise, I wouldn’t bother posting here. And both my heart and my mind tells me that what happened in South Africa conceivably could happen here, but not until and unless would-be reformers, such as the participants in this forum, begin to demonstrate a sense of discipline, unity, dedication, and singleness of purpose that heretofore they have never shown previously.
There was a saying among the ringleaders of the American Revolution to the effect that we must all hang together, or surely we will all hang separately. How many more generations of Americans must live under the boot heel of oppression before those who would stand in opposition take to heart that simple and eloquent truth?
wow. that is a very comprehensive and insightful comment.
thanks. A lot to digest.
I concur with Zandar1. And I think it has begun. Gonzo will go. The rest will follow. The Dems know that this time it has to be more than cosmetic.