[S]urveying current politics, I find myself missing Richard Nixon.I think he may be correct. And it is not going to change anytime soon, since not only is the Congress in thrall to corporations and cash-flush interest and astroturf groups funded by them.
No, I haven’t lost my mind. Nixon was surely the worst person other than Dick Cheney ever to control the executive branch.
But the Nixon era was a time in which leading figures in both parties were capable of speaking rationally about policy, and in which policy decisions weren’t as warped by corporate cash as they are now. America is a better country in many ways than it was 35 years ago, but our political system’s ability to deal with real problems has been degraded to such an extent that I sometimes wonder whether the country is still governable.
In recent years, the Supreme Court has aligned itself, time after time, with the rich and the powerful to the detriment of the poor and the workers. Any attempt to rein in the effect of corporate cash on the political process would fail at the Supreme Court.
Let's get to the most corrosive idea that has corrupted the political process: The legal fiction that corporations are natural persons. They are not. You cannot beat the shit out of a corporation. A corporation cannot be imprisoned. Corporations feel no pain, they have no emotions, no instinct. Corporations may be considered to be artificial persons for the purposes of contracts, regulations and criminal law. Corporations should have some limited rights of free speech; the concept of commercial speech is fairly well settled.
The idea that corporations have the full First Amendment rights of citizens does little more than enable corruption. You need only look at the current health-care debate to see senators from marginally productive states falling in line to defend the health insurance companies. Those senators are from states with high levels of poor and working poor people who would stand the most to benefit from a national health care system with a robust public option, yet those senators are more than willing to put their boots in the backs of their constituents and stand on their prostrate bodies in order to accept larger and larger
One of the things that keeps workers tied to bad jobs is health insurance. People will stay in a job that does not suit them and accept masses of abuse from their superiors because they have health insurance. And that last point, Dear Reader, will be the subject of another post.
4 comments:
That's correct - easy to see - easy to understand - makes sense - and is easily corrected.
Of course it won't be as we continue our slide into the shitter.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2LubuSAgB5s
Indeed, the very reason why health insurance became tied to jobs in the post-WWII era was to tie workers to the big corporations who employed them and make it harder for small guys to compete with the big corporations. It was deliberate policy that originated in the big corporations for their own benefit.
One of the nasty things the Republicans have done is make the United States ungovernable. We're seeing that first-hand here in California. Up until about 30 years ago, California was governable because both the Republicans and Democrats were interested in making sure the state was governable. But at some point the Republicans decided that the best government was no government, and set about kneecapping California state government to the point where the state is insolvent. What used to be the best schools in the nation are now funded on a level with Mississippi, there's more money going to the California prison system than to the California university system now, etc. At some point it became all about winning, all about ideology, not about what was best for the state and its people. And as the state of California goes, so does the nation...
- Badtux the Governance Penguin
It sure does seem like the "haves" have declared war on the "have nots". The corporations are chomping the bit to return us to the era of "the company store". Of course, the people who supposedly care the most about their liberty are the one with their lips firmly planted on the corporation's dupa.
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