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This Part 2 commentary is a
follow up to something I wrote on 7/10/08 by the same name. I
want to clarify a couple of points…
First of all Capitalism and
Democracy need not be incompatible with one another;
they just happen to be that way right now in the United
States.
The point here is that in a
democracy, (or to be more accurate, in a republic such as the
one conceived by our Founders), We the People are supposed to
be self-governing—the supreme creators, designers, managers,
and deciders of how our society will work, including how we
will distribute among ourselves, the benefits that accrue from the wisdom and
hard work of our citizens.
But when you have a government
that no longer respects the sovereignty of its People and an
economic system that works for the benefit of the few rather
than for the many, you are no longer living in the same
republic that was conceived by the Founders. Today, this is
where we find ourselves. For example, consider how our government is handling the much publicized mortgage debacle.
To obtain a rational understanding of what the government is
doing, compared to what they should be doing, click
here.
Capitalism has been used
strategically by the wealthiest among us, to transfer wealth from the middle
class (and others who are vulnerable), to
themselves—believing that they have the right to maximize
their own wealth even at the expense of the public good just
because they can. In fact, many believe that’s what
capitalists are supposed to do. They will even make a
public relations effort to argue that their right to do that
actually benefits everyone. The truth is…it really
doesn’t.
Part of how they accomplish
their goals is to corrupt the political process so that representatives
are maneuvered (perhaps willingly) to
give their allegiance to them rather than to us.
Capitalists with assistance
from their controlled political and media pawns have used their power to
disseminate lies using all sorts of disinformation strategies
for their own purposes. So much so, that We the People have lost touch with who we are, where we came from, what our
responsibilities are, and where we should be going.
Government officials got the
idea that they could get away with governing this way through
experience. We inadvertently led them to the inescapable
conclusion that we are too busy, too disorganized, too
divided, too uninformed, and too complacent to understand or
care about what they are up to. They learned that our
attention could easily be misdirected with slick, slight of
hand, public relations propaganda that obscures reality. They learned that the money to purchase that
propaganda was more important to getting themselves reelected
than simply working hard and doing a good job.
So now they don’t
bother to do an honest day's work, and we don't bother to keep
track of what they actually do or don't do; they only have to make sure
they can raise enough money to
run sophisticated advertising campaigns at election time
to keep themselves in office. That's their strategy for job security.
It works. I once read that there is less turnover in
Congress than their used to be in the Soviet Politburo.
They don't accomplish that simply by doing a good
job.
All this
didn’t happen at once. It evolved over time. We
citizens learned to be complacent while capitalists and
government officials learned that we could be easily
manipulated into remaining that way.
Now this is not a secret. While
we’ve been walking around uninformed and semi-conscious, the
rest of the world has been passing us by. We’ve been busy
listening to the voices chosen for us by our corporate owned media,
whose job it is, is to keep telling us that we are the salt of
the Earth, the best in the world at just about everything;
that we have nothing to learn from other points of view or
even from the successes already achieved by other societies.
Consider….
- We are the wealthiest nation
in the world and yet other countries are able to provide
all of their citizens with free health care and manage to
do it at less expense, while still achieving lower infant
mortality rates and longer life expectancies than we have?
- How come other nations offer
their people a shorter workweek, longer paid vacations,
and, on average, a more secure economic safety net than
our citizens have?
- How come the citizens of
other democracies have much broader participation in their
government, including political representation from many
political parties representing a wider spectrum of ideas?
… in other words, more democracy.
- How come other countries are
able to offer a better education to all their children and
in many cases, a free or near free college education to
all who are qualified as
well?
- How come other countries are
able to offer their citizens greater consumer protection
against unscrupulous and irresponsible corporations?
- How come we spend so much of
our human and financial capital on building weapons and
making war when it only wastes resources and transfers so much
of our wealth to those who gain from other people's suffering?
- How come the citizens of other
nations are informed about the crimes and injustices
perpetrated by our government against other people in our name,
while we, the stakeholders, remain
largely oblivious?
Now I’m not suggesting that
other countries do everything better than we do. We do a lot of
things better than anyone else. But what harm
would it be to learn from the success of others so we might enjoy
the same benefits? Americans are internationally famous for
being arrogant and uninformed. It’s very costly. We’ve
lost perspective and insight into what is possible.
There’s been a steady transfer of wealth in this country
from the less well off to the very well off. The wealthiest among us like it
that way. But it's corruption and a betrayal of our national
purpose.
Here’s a quote from something
I wrote on March 21, 2001 in response to Bush’s then new tax
plan after hearing him describe it to us. You can read the
rest of my comment in my book, The
Answer:
“The Bush plan is the greatest rip off that has ever
been postulated. It probably represents the largest single
publicly sponsored transfer of wealth from the poor to the
rich that was ever purposely devised. It does this in two
ways, neither of which is intuitively obvious, and I'll
explain that in a minute. But make no mistake about it. Every
time a wealthy individual or corporation uses money or
influence to buy special favors from government, it robs the
public treasury, steals from the poor, and diminishes every
American and every American dream. And that's what's happening
here.”
I knew immediately that
Bush’s plan was a deception as soon as he opened his mouth
to talk about it. Of course, I had the advantage of having
studied economics and finance in school. The only reason I
decided to write about it was that I couldn’t find anyone
else expressing my point of view in the mainstream media. It
was a moment of personal disillusionment. I thought to
myself, where are all the economists, economics
professors, and political scientists who should be able to see that he is outright lying
about what his plan is designed to accomplish.
And when Bush and his enablers
decided that torture, invasions of privacy, illegal
occupations of other countries, and even the discarding of
Constitutional provisions that define our own national soul...was
now going to be the accepted norm, where were all the lawyers in the
country who took an oath to preserve and protect the
Constitution? Where were all the members of Congress who took
an oath of office to do the same? And didn't we all make that
pledge too? Where is everybody? What has happened
to our sense of decency and love of freedom?
We need to do better than this
if we want to survive as a free country. We should give
some thought to these things before we step up to the voting booth this
next election.
“Liberty
lies in the hearts and minds of men and women;
when it dies
there, no constitution, no law, no court can save it;
no
constitution, no law, no court can even do much to help it…”
—Judge
Learned Hand
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