Democracy's Not For Dummies

"Reducing these problems to the typical good vs. evil political thought paralysis is exactly what rulers want. It keeps people battling over issues that should bring them together. Meanwhile, we move closer to economic and environmental breakdown through more wars, more mindless fossil fuel consumption, and more actual and dangerous bigotry towards American muslims than toward any immigrants, legal or illegal, from anywhere in the world."

By Frank Scott
(Friday, August 6, 2010)
Courtesy Of "Media Monitors"

Under the guise of fighting terrorism a paranoid and secretive U.S. government has several hundred thousand employees working with Top Secret clearance. How can anyone but an idiot expect to keep secrets when hundreds of thousands of people have access to them? And with so many top secretly watching one another watch one another, how did billions of dollars suddenly vanish from an Iraqi slush fund?

When facts about the Afghanistan war that should have been common knowledge had we a truly free media were finally revealed to the public, the heroic revealer was arrested while the cowardly concealers charged that he was endangering our military. These traitorous jackals clamor for more troops in Afghanistan while denying jobs here at home where the only stimulus program sends workers to invade foreign countries for alleged defense of our “homeland” . This costs thousands of lives, billions of dollars, makes more enemies for us and increases the threat of terrorist attacks.

Our industrial infrastructure is in dangerous disrepair, our financial infrastructure is propped up by taxpayers who get nothing but personal debt for their public investment, millions are unemployed and descending into poverty, the upper middle class is being lowered to middle while the middle sinks into permanent debt . And government spending is criticized for everything but foreign wars that cost trillions, profit a small minority and cause deadly loss for the great majority.

The venal idiots and sanctimonious dolts in charge of this disaster have enough weapons to destroy the world as they claim to preserve democracy here - where it hasn’t existed since the original western settlers arrived - while creating it in other nations - where it hasn’t a chance to exist until western military settlers depart . If we were citizens instead of merely consumers we might see that we make an insane asylum look like a center for the pursuit of reason and morality.

After the supreme court made it even easier to market politicians, corporate money is flooding the financial cesspool mind management calls our democracy. The wealthiest not only indirectly purchase their political servants but in the further privatization of government decide to take direct political power themselves. The billionaire who bought the mayor’s office in New York has set a trend and now another billionaire is attempting to purchase the governor’s office in California. How long before another billionaire puts a down payment on the presidency?

Media dutifully reports who has the most campaign money and is therefore a sure winner when the people - in their usual minorities - go to the polls and select either a billionaire or the tool of billionaires. Calling this a democracy would only make sense to patients at the world’s busiest mental health crisis center.

In the midst of what we’re told is an economic recovery that hasn’t yet reached tens of millions who don't own banks , the armed menace not only continues but has more billions shoveled into the Pentagon psycho ward, with more ominous threats made to Iran on behalf of Israel and saber rattling directed at North Korea, Venezuela and Somalia, among others. It is imperative for the public to take action that will turn this monstrous if enfeebled state vehicle around before it goes over a cliff. But not if we continue to be divided by political ploys that set minorities against minorities and prevent identification of the problems affecting the majority. Those cannot be solved by ghettoized groups of Americans, but only by a united democratic nation.

The color coded insurrections we create in foreign countries that are falsely called democratic revolutions may be ironically balanced by color coded red and blue states rising against the government here. Manipulated by focus groups and polling, voters are reduced to market research clusters and subjected to advertising campaigns that sell politicians as so many consumer goods. But there may be a backlash and recent actions in Arizona and Missouri are signs of hope even as they are criticized as misguided over reactions. Both states attempt to confront real problems which bring great private profit to owners of the federal structure but social loss to them. While their analysis of capitalism may be naive, so is their opponent’s unquestioning acceptance of immigration and health care policies that benefit minority capital at the expense of a majority of the people.

Reducing these problems to the typical good vs. evil political thought paralysis is exactly what rulers want. It keeps people battling over issues that should bring them together. Meanwhile, we move closer to economic and environmental breakdown through more wars, more mindless fossil fuel consumption, and more actual and dangerous bigotry towards American muslims than toward any immigrants, legal or illegal, from anywhere in the world.

Calling for unity among America’s disunited can only seem hopeless to those with no real desire for survival. None of us will be safer and most of us will be in great danger if the fanatic Israeli lobby gets a lunatic American government to go along with an attack on Iran. The suffering we would inflict on innocent Iranian people might be greater than what we would experience, initially, but at some point all of us will feel the deadly results of such an insanely immoral act. And we will feel it whether we are straight, gay, single, married, white, black, native or immigrant. Hopefully we will not need such a tragedy to bring us to our national senses, but we could strive towards democracy by thinking in terms of avoiding such a further calamity by beginning to act like the most important identity group with the most common interest; American members of a tragically, pointlessly, economically divided human race.