Saving Constitutional Gov't Is A Problem of "Gestalt" and Scope

[Parisle]

---- Reading DU posts the last few days has been truly illuminating, for it appears a tremendous number of DU'ers have even a cynical or pessimistic outlook on what would be the upshot of the democrats actually re-taking the House in November. Some think it won't happen, regardless of the vote,... and some think that no meaningful opposition to the neocon administration would result from a new democratic majority in the House. No investigations,.. no impeachment,.. just more of the good cop - bad cop charade of a one-party system masquerading as two parties,... or a jerk on the reins by a hidden corporatist class.

---- I wish I could say definitively that this was not the case, but I cannot. However you wish to characterize the situation, whether it's Chomsky's single, de facto "business" party, a "political industry" of colluding corporate flunkies, or a sudden PNAC blip on our historical radar screen, the conclusion is probably the same. Supposedly "democratic" balloting does not lead to majority rule choices, when the only choices are those set forth by the entrenched power structure. How many expressions of popular will are currently being either implicitly or tacitly over-ridden? All of them?

---- Responsive and accountable government isn't going to come from two allegedly competing parties who feed at the same corporate trough. That is the "gestalt" of the problem confronting the American electorate, the "figure-ground" political puzzle which keeps things the way they are. But it is easy to solve, hard to act upon.

---- The government intended by the framers of the Constitution cannot exist when corporate campaign contributions and corporate lobbying efforts,... "bribes," if you will,.. supply the financial fuel for elections, and obtaining votes is simply a matter of telling a well-structured lie. The advertising industry will tell you that the latter task is not a big deal. Politicians are human,... they will go for the gold every time,.. and then rationalize their betrayal of the system and its electorate,... and the bottom-line explanation for this resides puely in human nature, itself. And that is the key. The Constitution was written to protect us from human nature,... in effect, from ourselves.

---- They gave us laws and principles in which to trust, because they knew that people like Bush might some day occupy the presidency,.. and is not Bush finding those laws and principles "inconvenient?"

---- The slow erosion of Constitutional safeguards has not occurred as the result of philosophical ideology. It has occurred through the ascendency of the corporation as the dominant political life-form in politics. It is nothing less than the modern incarnation of feudalism. Forget about republicans or, for that matter, democrats. They are spear-carriers. There was never but one true enemy of the Constitution, and that was human nature, human imperfection. And that downside potential has come manifestly to life in the form of the modern global corporation. There is the true enemy of the American Constitutional legacy,..for only "Big Business" could amass the money and power to play devil's advocate to the genius of the Founding Fathers.

---- Today, we have corporations which engage in politics while having no special interest in its civic purpose,.. which exhort patriotism while having none of their own,.. and which scoff at concepts of morality and the common good. These are the institutions and individuals which we allow to fund the working of "the greatest deliberative body on Earth," ... our own Congress? And we further permit them to cloak their subversive purposes as an expression of Freedom of Speech? Doesn't make sense, does it?

---- There is more to this angle and approach, to be sure. But skirmishing against bit-player republicans and hoping for the best with equivocating democrats isn't going to take the battle to the enemy. The American "people" need a new vehicle which is not a political party, and they need a "base" from which to operate which is safe from political reach and interference,.. and they need to target the weak spot of looming corporate oligarchy.

---- ( Next: "The Gameplan" )

[Tace]

1. I Look Forward To "The Gameplan"

I'm wondering about the "new vehicle which is not a political party."

[alvarezadams]

2. Careful

By not towing the party line you might find your thread locked.

:mad:

A quick look at history will show that the current situation is neither new nor unique. The discourse has hardly changed from the turn of the LAST century - from the muguwumps' run against corruption to trust-busting to Twain's fight against a previous imperial experiment (Philippines).

We go through a "reform period" every 50 years or so and we're long overdue. With the money spent by the reactionary forces (and the lack of apparent interest in reform by the "opposition" party) I won't hold my breath. There's a thread now on DU about the $45 million that the GOP will spend on personal attacks.

Compared to the ONE BILLION spent yearly, election or no election, on RW thinktanks (etc), it's just more bait and switch.

If we want to change anything it will have to be from the bottom - and in our own house (the DNC).

[Parisle]

3. Thanks, alvarez,...

---- I'm still new enough in DU that I don't know what "thread locked" means, exactly. But the follow-up on this essay,... "The Gameplan," ... will indeed approach the problem from the bottom up,... and not just within the democratic party,... but state-by-state, as well. I believe that is how we are going to have to get a handle on the current situation.

[annabanana]

4. An excellent and enlightening post.

Thank you. As you say,.."easy to solve, hard to act upon".

Those who have bought their influence "fair and square" will squeal like stuck pigs when we try to wrest it away from them.

[emcguffie]

5. When and how was it that corporations became equal to individuals?

I know that happened and that's a problem, but I don't understand how it came about in the first part. Or I've forgotten.

I do know that the Anti-Trust Dept. in the US Justice Dept used to be very active, at least until Reagan, when they pretty much shut it down. So the end of the last century has to me looked very similar to the end of the previous one and the beginning of the last one, the robber barons and the Gilded Age.

They were in control, the people started fighting back, they got pissed off. It took them the better part of a century to get back in control, but they did it, and we're right back where we started, only the world is a much smaller place and they are now gobbling up every last resource, after tossing the people living near those resources on some garbage heap somewhere.

If the individual states make corporations not equal to individuals, what would happen?

[bvar22]

6. Excellent post.

A represenative Government OF the People would be busting ass to give us the following:

"In recent polls by the Pew Research Group, the Opinion Research Corporation, the Wall Street Journal, and CBS News, the American majority has made clear how it feels. Look at how the majority feels about some of the issues that you'd think would be gospel to a real Democratic Party:

1. 65 percent (of ALL Americans, Democrats AND Republicans) say the government should guarantee health insurance for everyone -- even if it means raising taxes.

2. 86 percent favor raising the minimum wage (including 79 percent of selfdescribed "social conservatives").

3. 60 percent favor repealing either all of Bush's tax cuts or at least those cuts that went to the rich.

4. 66 percent would reduce the deficit not by cutting domestic spending but by reducing Pentagon spending or raising taxes.

5. 77 percent believe the country should do "whatever it takes" to protect the environment.

6. 87 percent think big oil corporations are gouging consumers, and 80 percent (including 76 percent of Republicans) would support a windfall profits tax on the oil giants if the revenues went for more research on alternative fuels.

7. 69 percent agree that corporate offshoring of jobs is bad for the U.S. economy (78 percent of "disaffected" voters think this), and only 22% believe offshoring is good because "it keeps costs down."
http://alternet.org/wiretap/29788/

8. Over 63% oppose the War on the Iraqi People.

9. 92% of ALL AMERICANS support TRANSPARENT, VERIFIABLE elections!
http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=203x446445


The Democratic Party is a BIG TENT, but there is NO ROOM for those
who advance the agenda of THE RICH (Corporate Owners) at the EXPENSE of LABOR and the POOR.