Should We Allow America To Destroy Itself in Order To Save It?

Ralph Nader has been saying it for decades: The two-party system in America is a lose/lose game, with both parties prostrating themselves to the moneyed gods of Wall Street and K Street while the American people sink deeper into a listless sleep to avoid dealing with the ugly reality of a dying democracy.

A recent article in Salon grapples with the issue that Nader and others have raised, which is, at its core, that we may need to let America hit rock bottom before a large swath of citizens will wake up to the reality that conservative ideology in general, and the Republican Party in particular, offer nothing that will help this country become a healthy democracy again.

The title of the Salon article is, “Just Let the Republicans Win: Maybe Things Have to Get Really Bad for America to Wake Up.” The author discusses the pros and cons of not voting for Hillary if she receives the nomination from the Democrats, and I think many of the arguments are on the money. If we progressives keep acquiescing to the establishment Democrats, we will keep getting candidates like Bill Clinton, Kerry, Obama and now Hillary, luke warm liberals who, once they’re in office, rush to the ideological center to keep the one percent happy.

Roosevelt’s New Deal may not have seen the light of day if not for the Great Depression. We as a country might need to fall hard again to remind ourselves that America is supposed to have a government of, for and by the people, not the billionaires or corporations or the military/industrial/media complex.

Like the Salon article’s author, I have yet to decide what I’ll do if Hillary wins the Democratic nomination. The one option not discussed in the essay is a massive write in campaign for Sanders. Either way, 2016 could be the election when progressives say enough is enough, and let this country have the President it deserves.

The Corrupt, Dysfunctional Mess We Call the Federal Government

A Salon headline asks, “The Secret Service’s Mind-blowing Abuse of Power: Why do Government Agencies Keep Spying on Lawmakers?” The article focuses on a report from Homeland Security detailing how Secret Service employees hacked into private databases in an effort to find and leak intimidating and embarrassing information about a vocal critic of the agency, Chair of the House Oversight Committee Jason Chavetz.

The answer to Salon’s headline question is very simple, government agencies spy on lawmakers to intimidate them and keep the money pipeline flowing into their agencies’ coffers. It’s a form of blackmail, and it works extremely well. Despite the occasional outburst of indignation when the spooks get publically caught with their hand in the cookie jar, the system in place to keep elected officials quiet and generous runs smoothly. Heck, no one even knows exactly how much money Congress gives our surveillance agencies because it’s all top secret, you understand.

Everyone has skeletons in their closets and, if you’re a Congressperson, you are acutely aware that the NSA, CIA, Secret Service and other organizations have access to every detail of your past, and won’t be afraid to reveal it if necessary. So, when funding time rolls around, you’re more than happy to give our spies whatever they desire.

This is definitely not the type of check and balance our forefathers had in mind.  In fact, they would be appalled at what only nominally passes for a federal government in the United States. The Supreme Court is in the clutches of partisan ideologues beholden to the one percent, the executive branch (since George Bush) has given itself unprecedented powers to wage war any damn place it wants and murder anyone it pleases, and Congress is a dysfunctional mental asylum made up of half-wits and demagogues who are the property of America’s billionaires.

The “why” in the Salon headline is simple to answer, but the “how,” as in how do we fix the corrupt mess we call our government, is nearly impossible to answer without some very drastic changes.

Our government lies constantly, but that’s no reason to believe in conspiracy theories

There are some very contradictory and confused arguments in an article in today’s Salon, “America’s Conspiracy Mania: Why Ebola and 9/11 truthers reflect a tortured history.” The strange angle the author takes is that if the government would just stop lying to Americans so much, we might not have so many crazy conspiracy theories. Okay… Good luck with that.

On the one hand, the author details a number of times the government has lied and misled the American people, on the other, he flippantly dismisses the possibility that the government has lied about other issues, such as 9/11.

There is a long history of real U.S. government conspiracies, from the CIA’s Tuskegee syphilis experiments to dosing unsuspecting citizens with LSD to the fabrication of the Gulf of Tonkin incident to illegal mass surveillance by the NSA. But according to the author, there’s no reason to suspect any current conspiracy theories are legitimate.

As an example of our gullibility, the author points out that one-third of Americans polled in 2006 believed that the Bush Administration had either planned the 9/11 attacks or new about them beforehand and did nothing to stop. Perhaps, just perhaps, so many people believe this crazy conspiracy theory because there is a mountain of evidence indicating it is true.