No Matter Who Wins the White House, Americans Lose

Are you as nauseated, saddened, horrified and disgusted by this Presidential election campaign as I am? In one generation, mine, this country has gone from the world’s beacon of democracy and prosperity to the giant village idiot bumbling and stumbling incoherently around the planet, an untethered corporate mascot gone berserk.

With the ascension of Trump, our election process has become an international joke, and other countries look at us with pity and sadness as they watch a once admired champion lean helplessly against the ropes, punch-drunk and bran damaged, in what is surely its final round.

We are here today thanks to greed, plain and simple. Despite a booming economy and a real chance for citizens to live the American dream, the military/industrial/media complex of the 1960s/70s, like Frankenstein’s monster suddenly realizing it has superhuman strength, woke up to its horrible potential to influence this country’s political process through its wealth and connections to America’s elites. The ball really got rolling during the Reagan administration with its tax cuts for the wealthy and, despite sixteen years of Democratic rule, the trajectory has been downhill ever since.

Having destroyed America’s middle class, stretched income inequality to ludicrous extremes and purchased the two major political parties, the wealthy elites are surely enjoying the spectacle we serfs naively call a democratic election. The reality is, they don’t care who is crowned President. The oily, snake-tongued Trump is one of their members, as is the neo-liberal Clinton. Neither candidate is a threat to the current hegemony that is pulling this country beneath the surface like a weight tied around its ankles.

The corporate media dutifully continues its assigned goal of making the Presidential campaign look like a race when it is actually more like a horrific automobile accident from which we can’t avert our eyes. Our elections have turned into a dark spectacle, a cirque du macabre of huge laughing orange faces, cackling countesses and obese promoters counting their stacks of coins backstage. We willingly pay the price of admission while they laugh at our gullibility from behind the curtains, filling their vaults with our hard earned cash.

This election year, regardless of who moves into the White House, Americans will lose, and despite being conned once again, their attention will be drawn to the shiny object the media tells them is the next big thing.

Windmills 1, Democracy 0

A note about yesterday’s primary vote here in California that seems to exemplify the shady nature of the Democratic nomination process. Both Katharine and I are registered to vote in California. We both received confirmation of this, and we were sent a card notifying us of where to vote. Despite this, when we went to our polling place, surprise, we weren’t on the list. We were given “provisional” ballots that, instead of going through the machine and being counted, were stuffed in an envelope and ended up god knows where.

Of course, I can’t say if this was the result of any shenanigans on the part of the Democratic Party, but the result is our votes for Sanders were not counted yesterday. Since the beginning of the campaign for the Democratic Presidential nominee, the process has been compromised, controlled and co-opted by the DNC in conjunction with national media outlets to anoint Hillary Clinton the Party’s champion in November.

It’s a no-win situation for Sander’s supporters. Despite the obvious collusion between the Clinton campaign and the DNC, Sander’s supporters who complain will be labeled as sore losers and conspiracy theorists by the corporate media. Using every dirty trick at their disposal, the establishment has won, as it was ordained long ago by America’s elites.

This ugly coronation called a campaign only serves to reinforce the sad reality that America is an oligarchy, a country governed by the rich for the rich, and Clinton is a bona fide, card-carrying member of the ruling class. So far have we fallen that the choice given to us on election day will be between a narcissistic, racist dictator-in-waiting and a morally bankrupt, money-worshipping tool of the elites.

I thank Bernie Sanders for taking on the hapless job of attacking the windmills. Though the odds were always against you, you fought courageously and for all the right reasons.

Yesterday’s Elections and the American Death Spiral

As yesterday’s local and statewide elections demonstrated, American democracy continues its downward death spiral. Politically disillusioned, disappointed and dis-engaged young people, people of color, liberals and progressives stayed away from the polls in droves, allowing older conservative white voters to rule the day. That is the death spiral in which we find ourselves. Many would-be voters have simply given up. And you know what? It’s hard to blame them.

In the nineties we voted for a presidential candidate who sounded liberal during his two campaigns, but once in office, slid to the right. We did it again in 2008 and 2012, falling for the liberal, populist rhetoric of Obama, only to see him shape-shift into a moderate Republican after he was given the keys to the White House. And it’s not just in our heads. A recent study by Princeton University professors revealed that the average American, whether that person votes or not, has virtually no influence in government policymaking. The concluding paragraph of Testing Theories of American Politics: Elites, Interest Groups and Average Americans reads:

“Despite the seemingly strong empirical support in previous studies for theories of majoritarian democracy, our analyses suggest that majorities of the American public actually have little influence over the policies our government adopts. Americans do enjoy many features central to democratic governance, such as regular elections, freedom of speech and association, and a wide-spread (if still contested) franchise. But we believe that if policymaking is dominated by powerful business organizations and a small number of affluent Americans, then America’s claims to being a democratic society are seriously threatened.” 

I would argue that far from being merely threatened, democracy in America has been hijacked by the one percent, with the help of the Supreme Court, and we now live in an oligarchy. I don’t encourage people not to vote, but I understand the reasoning. Elections have become exercises in futility and the only citizens that have any influence in Washington are those with the deepest pockets.

Koch brothers announce they are buying the 2016 elections

What do you get the billionaire who has everything? How about the United States of America? 

Charles and David Koch have announced that their political network is planning to spend nearly a billion dollars on conservative candidates for House and Senate seats and the presidency in 2016.

Thanks to their ideological soul mates on the Supreme Court, the Koch’s can now lavish money on their chosen candidates through an immense network of non-profit groups without, in many cases, having to identify donors. Koch-approved Republicans will get writer’s cramps endorsing their checks.

Does this sound like democracy to you? Me neither. America is quickly becoming an oligarchy where a small minority of elites determine who goes to Washington. The system of checks and balances instituted by our founders has clearly broken down, and voting has become an exercise in futility.

It’s a shame. America began as a brilliant experiment in democracy, but has been taken over by the insatiably greedy 1 percent whose only allegiance is to the bottom line.

Supreme Court ruling is death knell for democracy

The Supreme Court’s McCutcheon decision allowing a donor to contribute millions of hard dollars -- in limited contributions -- to political parties, candidates and political action committees is essentially the final nail in the coffin of fair, democratic elections in this country.

This is a huge win for Republicans who rely on cranky white billionaires and large corporations for a lot of their campaign contributions. Now the wealthy can skew the political system even further toward their interests and farther from the vision of democracy championed by our founders.

Making the absurd observation that influence and access are not a corruption concern, Roberts, Scalia, Kennedy, Alito and Thomas handed this country’s future over to the elites whose only allegiance is to the bottom line. I don’t believe there has ever been a time in our country’s history where the will of the people has been so callously disregarded by those in power.

We’re no longer on the road to an oligarchy, we’ve arrived.

            

Dark times

I’ve been experiencing a strong sense of helplessness lately.

Our political system is no longer “our” — as in “the people’s” — political system. It now belongs to a cabal of ultra wealthy individuals and multinational corporations who regularly buy house and senate members and send lobbyists to crawl all over Capital Hill like maggots feeding on a corpse.

We have no control over what government feels it can do in our name. Revelations of spying by the NSA and other government agencies makes it clear that those who supposedly represent us are actually fearful of us, enough so that they are willing to shred the Constitution to keep tabs on our every word. Civil protests are treated as terrorist gatherings. Peaceful protesters are beaten, maced and arrested. Those who dare expose government malfeasance are locked away in prisons or forced into exile. Drones are sent in our name to execute people who have never had a trial or been convicted of a crime, and in many cases, innocent civilians are collateral damage.

You can still vote, can’t you? Yes and no. Republican statehouses are doing everything they can to keep minority citizens from voting. Then there’s gerrymandering. And when we do vote, our choices are limited to corporate lackey A or corporate lackey B. Voting machines are highly susceptible to manipulation and there is strong evidence they have been secretly tampered with in past elections. And, if a national election is close, we can count on the Supreme Court to step in and choose a winner based on the political preferences of the majority.

Finally, there is the corporate propaganda machine that some still refer to as the American media. Under the control of a handful of companies, our media works at the behest of its masters, conveying corporate friendly news and entertainment designed more to mesmerize than inform, distract more than engage, while it continually reassures the masses that everything is under control as the world burns around them.

I see fewer and fewer avenues for citizens to realistically exert their will. That’s a bad sign in a country that calls itself a democracy. We elected Barack Obama on the promise of change, but that promise turned out to be a blatant lie, and the last six years have seen us move inexorably closer to an oligarchy rather than away from it.

So where do we go from here? How do we make our voices heard? How do we return the balance of power to the people of America? The unfortunate reality is that the list of possible responses to these questions is growing shorter and shorter with every passing day.