In a newsgroup recently I was confronted with the typical right-wing opinion that Gingrich had to chastise the Democrats for the pork they allowed into their bills, and the person writing it hadn’t a clue as to the fact that in the past four years nothing has changed. The outcome of this history here, with Republicans proving themselves to be just as guilty, is that pork is the vice of politicians in general and not one side or the other. The pundits would, could and most likely will bore us to tears over semantics concerning this truth, but it’s a sign of our political process and the flaws that lie within. Our elected officials cannot resist providng the ‘hook-up’.
From local politics on up it’s the same as it ever was, with patronage determining who had to work for theirs and who got to coast. The design of our nation in the Constitution and Bill of Rights has taken us this far, but over time we’re begining to reap the whirlwind as it becomes more and more apparant that our politicians are advocates for who lines their pockets moreso than they are advocates for who lines their vote totals.
This is the flaw in our democracy, that the stock prices not only have access to the people with power to enact change, but that their courting of these elected officials is an industry worthy of a name…K Street. World History tells us that human nature makes us incapable of anything else. Power, greed and vanity rule in Washington DC.
Our democracy fails us in this regard. The evidence is all around us. Keneth Lay was on Cheney’s energy panel while his subordinates were orchestrating bogus blackouts in order to gouge Californians with their prices. You can’t get more cozy than that. So let’s get past the idea of a CEO equalling a living person in society and call them what they really are…walking stock prices.
CEO’s are the embodiment of that number indicating what a company is worth on a given day. They authorize whatever it takes to make as much money as they can, and if someone becomes wise to what’s going on, the claim ignorance and see what happens. Our president is a product of this. Notice how nothing that goes wrong ever makes it within a stone’s throw of his office. It’s the final frontier for stock prices in America, as the method used to keep them healthy in the market is now allowing the president to do the same.
Take the argument made for invading Iraq and compare it to what Enron did to it’s customers and investors. In both cases the leader claimed ignorance, only now the government person who does it is better off than the CEO. The stock price can’t get away with everything, but we’re seeing now that as long as the stock price has been elected and blessed by the other stock prices who decide what equals ‘news’, the sky’s the limit.
Ask any person you know about politicians and most will put them in the same category as lawyers…they’ll refer to them as crooks most often. Then there’s the person who has been duped into believing that only half of the politicians are walking stock prices, while the other half is saving us from their wrath. Either way, the average person in America at least considers half of our politicians to be crooks.
Regardless of the label we apply, the people aren’t the problem. The people will do whatever is allowed by the system. World history is full of half-baked, yet seemingly brilliant constructs at the time, forms of government that work for a while, then collapse. The main snafu with governments before ours was that the difference between the ‘haves’ and the ‘have nots’ was silk sheets and starvation. In America the gap is still the same, but those of us who are poor can still buy Ramen Noodles by the case.
The idea after that is to pacify those of us working too hard into a state of bliss over knowing for sure that you’re right and everyone else is wrong. That’s what the Republican party has been able to do over the years. The stock prices have managed to convince half of the people who vote that the other side is full of shit from top to bottom, while salvation lies in whatever the hell they decide to shovel at them on a given day.
This is getting away from me at this point, so I’ll post and try to pick it up later…the point I’m trying to make though is that whether Democrat or Republican, it doesn’t matter, as the ‘stock price’ is in control. As long as the stock price is allowed to bribe the politician and deliver our news at the same time, we’re headed for destruction.
Church and state are focused on in terms of where one should begin and end in respect to the other, but it’s all just part of the smoke screen set up to distract us from the reality that our concerns should really lie in the relation between state and stock price.
At this point I’d be willing to forego meat on a day or sit in church because I was told to as long as someone like Kenneth Lay wasn’t consulted for advice on how the government should regulate his business.