Broken Democracy

It is not a radical notion to say that our democracy is broken. Bitter partisanship has become the rule of the day and little is actually done in DC anymore unless the party in power bullies the opposition. The problem is the Republicans are substantially better at bullying than Democrats -- whether they are in power or not. When they are in power, they push legislation through by simply ignoring the oppositional party, even if the American people stand with them. When they fall out of power, they simply block everything they can and then blame their counterparts across the aisle. 

Today America stands on the precipice of economic and cultural ruin. And there are answers to many of our problems. For one, we have a major ecological problem that is increasingly being felt by the public. Many democrats want to do something about this but the corporate world has blocked most serious attempts to do anything about it, backed by lobbying and a party that has decided science is an inconvenience whose truths they refuse to abide. A second growing issue is the number of men going around shooting their fellow citizens in some desperate attempt to go out with a boom. Gun control could start to address this issue, of the 30,000 or so Americans who die every year, but the NRA holds the GOP ransom and nothing is done. And on the most pressing issue -- the economic decline of America and the growing gap between the rich and everyone else -- the GOP merely seeks to undermine the power of government to do anything about it.

Corporations have gained too much power in the U.S. and now seek to delimit the power of the federal, state and local governments to address their crimes and misdemeanors. Profits and productivity have been rising for 30 years, but the benefits have increasingly been meted out only to the chosen few. Corporate misdeeds are increasingly difficult to address and even attempts to maintain the mirage of "free markets" undermined by lax anti-trust laws that allow monopolies and oligopolies to proliferate. The reduction in taxes on capital and income together with the push for deregulation has undermined the power of government to intervene and the new campaign finance reforms have essentially given corporations and right wing ideologues the ability to spend obscene amounts of money to ensure that the public does not stir up too much trouble.

We live in a representative democracy and the first responsibility of our representatives is to actually represent our interests. But this has not been the case for some time now and the explosion of lobbying in the 1980s further separated representatives from the interests of their constituents. But the change in the tone of Washington starting in the 1990s has set a dangerous precedent, where hard line politics trumps any attempt to actually address or provide recourse to those who suffer under our brand of gorilla capitalism. When one considers the current milieu from the outside the clear implication is that we have entered a soft form of corporate fascism in this country and that the only way to address the situation is for the people to take back their country. Thomas Jefferson once argued that it was the right and the responsibility of the people to challenge their government and, if and when it stops representing their interests, replace it. Isn't it time the people stood up and demanded just that?