Sunday, June 3, 2018

America Needs a Real Alternative to Corporatism

The title of this blog entry might seem like an obvious statement that most people disagree with, and indeed, I know people of both political persuasions, and who belong to both major political parties, who would agree with it.

However, when you look into this issue a little bit more carefully, you cannot help but notice that the problem obviously persists, and is relentless. 

Obviously, I have my own opinions as to why, and it goes well beyond merely the politics of the thing. After all, here in the United States, we tend to value wealth, and the power and privileges that this brings, more than anything else. And so naturally, when that is the case, you will inevitably get corrupt people attracted to positions of power, formulizing strategies to obtain what they want. They are the most skilled of salesmen, and while they fail us at being so-called leaders, they play the part of responsible government officials, while raking in the dough and never failing to literally cash in on every opportunity that comes their way.

Don't believe me? How many members of Congress are not millionaires? How many of them have recently struggled financially, and can understand and sympathize with "Joe Sixpack" or other average people? 

Not many, right? 

And you hear these ridiculous stories about prominent members of Congress taking huge sums of money from special interests. Speaker of the House Paul Ryan and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, for example, took millions of dollars from major players in the healthcare industry. So of course, they worked hard to repeal Obamacare, and to serve the interests of the major healthcare players who gave them all that money. You know, take care of the hands that take care of you, like those old Isotoner glove commercials used to say?

Now, I don't know about you, but that sounds a whole lot like blatant corruption to me. They are not even hiding the fact that they are serving the special interests that provide them all of those special perks and financial incentives, and all at the expense of what is best for the American people. And those are only two examples. There are plenty more, and yes, from both parties. There simply is no shortage of corrupt high-ranking government officials in both parties, truth be told. 

Here's the thing: the whole political process matches our blatant, rotten corruption at the top. I mean, everyone seems to know that the political system is clearly flawed. Hell, Trump won the damn election, and he was complaining - lousy - about how corrupt it was, both before and after the results came in. 

Trump won in 2016, despite having received nearly three million less votes then Hillary Clinton. Of course, he kept claiming that he had been victimized by massive voter fraud numbering in the millions, even though he offered not one serious shred of proof that this was indeed the case. But let us remember that there was a reason that he could state those things, because Hillary had indeed cheated. Sure, I know, loyal Hillary fans will, at this point, shrug their shoulders or make a face, and wave their hands contemptuously at this notion. Yet, Debbie Wasserman-Schultz outright stated that Hillary had asked for help, and indeed, the Democratic party leadership gave it to her. Bernie Sanders continued to be seen as strictly a fringe candidate, even though his poll numbers kept growing and growing, while Hillary's kept shrinking. It has been discovered since that thousands of voters, fi not more, were ptevented from voting in New York, and possibly some other places during the Democratic primary. 

This might seem like water under the bridge, yet the Democrats seem intent on repeating these mistakes, and this goes hand in hand with dismissing any serious charges that something terribly wrong and, yes, corrupt, occured during the Democratic primary of 2016. The fact of the matter is that the mainstream Democrats complain about how Trump is eroding democracy and ignoring democratic institutions and traditions, even while they themselves conveniently ignore the practices by the Democratic party leadership, and by the Hillary campaign, which also undermined democracy, and clearly insinuated corruption. 

That is why it is not irrelevant. That is why so many of us Bernie/Stein supporters simply could not sweep it all under the rug and get behind Hillary in 2016. And it is why we have trouble with the idea of unconditionally supporting the mainstream Democrats now, when they seem to show absolutely no signs of having learned any real lessons from 2016, or the general overall political trends of recent decades more generally. They continue to express horror at the excesses of Trump, and the erosion of democracy itself, even while all too conveniently ignoring their own role in undermining democracy during the 2016 election, when they assured that the candidate who was sinking like a rock would nevertheless get the nomination. Clearly, that undermined many people's faith in our democratic institutions, yet the mainstream Democrats remain as enthusiastic as ever to repeat that episode in history, and to nominate another version of Hillary Clinton - perhaps Hillary 2.0. Or, perhaps, they will outright nominate Hillary in 2020. It might seem unthinkable to some, but I actually would not be really surprised. 

It should be obvious that there are lessons to be learned. But if you get past party loyalty, and begin to see how the Democrats benefit from the current system that preserves their privileged status as one of two major parties in the country, then you begin to understand how the lesson never seems to sink in. In other words, the Democrats are part of the problem. 

Of course, that is also why the two parties seem to agree with each other so much. The only people who fail to see this, and who argue vehemently that this is not the case, are those who remain loyal to one of the two major parties, or people who profit from the song and dance that the two parties create, for the appearance of offering the population some substantive choice. In truth, it feels like the differences are so slight between them as to hardly even matter, frankly.

And that trend had definitely strongly contributed to the decline of American standards of living, and the erosion of democracy, more generally.

My brother recently commented on this for one of my posts, and what he had to say was interesting:

"I'd go so far as to say that Democrats have essentially been coasting on that strategy for decades. "If you don't want people like Dubya and Trump in the White House or in Congress, you'd better vote for whoever we nominate with little to no actual scrutiny of those candidates. If you refuse and we lose the election, not only will we not do any soul-searching, we'll blame everyone but ourselves." People who should know better chronically fail to take them to task for this shameless complacency, cynicism, emotional blackmail and entitlement, the result being that, as you and the author of this piece accurately point out, the Democrats are only nominally an opposition party – we're essentially told to choose between conservatives who masquerade as progressives when it's politically expedient to do so (Hillary Clinton is the perfect embodiment of such disingenuousness), and ultra-conservatives who openly condemn and oppose progressivism at every turn. Then people wonder why this country has shifted so far to the right."

Indeed, even though Americans seem collectively oblivious to it, the nation has shifted so much towards one end of the political spectrum, that being the pro-corporate political doctrine that has dominated this nation's politics and eaten away at the quality of life for almost four decades now, that many people feel that any alternative is pointless and unrealistic. Many mainstream Democrats sound very much like Republicans in dismissing certain ideas championed by Bernie Sanders, such as universal, affordable healthcare, are "pie in the sky" ideas that are unrealistic, and thus amount to hopeless dreaming. What they will not tell you is that many nations in the world already practice these kinds of policies, and that not one country that has such a healthcare system in place has turned it's back on it in favor of the American model. In fact, not only is such a system not "pie in the sky," but we stand as the only industrialized nation in the world that fails to provide it's citizens just such a system, instead forcing a for-profit healthcare system that numerous politicians suggest is the best system in the world, despite the tens of millions that remain uninsured, and the tens of millions more who remain underinsured, having few protections and being open to sky high price fleecing by hospitals, doctors, the health insurance industry, and big pharma. Americans are squeezed left and right, and pay far and away the high prices for healthcare of any nation in the world. And instead of trying to crack down on these abuses, our "leaders" of both parties instead try to crack down on American getting cheaper medicine and healthcare in neighboring countries, particularly Canada. Still, they say with a straight face that this healthcare system is the very best system in the world. Talk about "pie in the sky!"

The Democrats are as responsible, if not more responsible, for that kind of limited thinking and approach towards what passes in this country as political solutions. Yet, they, like so many Republicans, proudly proclaim this as the greatest country in the world, and subscrive to the notion of "American exceptionalism." Indeed, on many levels, we do stand out like a sore thumb, in comparison to the rest of the world. Perhaps that is why we stand as the only industrialized nation in the world that fails to provide it's citizens affordable, universal healthcare, or why childcare rates seem so astronomical, compared to those of other nations. Perhaps that is also why we are the only nation in the world that denies science to the extent that we do, as evidenced by our dubious status as the only nation not to be part of the Paris Climate Accord on the grounds that we, as symbolized by our President, reject the science behind it. Or how we are the only country in the world that subscribes to the notion that the solution to gun violence is more guns, even though rates of gun violence seem to be growing, and our rates of gun violence are ridiculously higher than any other industrialized nation in the world. Perhaps that is why we stand out as the nation with far and away the most prisoners of any nation in the world, with our for-profit prison system. And why we have a militarized police force in many communities across the nation, and why so many seemingly trigger happy police officers shoot first and ask questions later, even though we see more attractive, and obviously less deadly, alternatives in other countries. Perhaps that is why we spend more money on our greatly inflated military industrial complex, where the military budget is higher than the combined military budgets of the next ten countries, yet we keep cutting the budget for education and the arts and social security and healthcare and infrastructure and programs to assist those in need, due to the notion of some kind of budget crisis that we are continually supposed to buy into.

Of course, elections show that enough Americans truly believe that there is a budget crisis, even though they are convinced that not a penny from the military budget should ever be sacrificed. Clearly, the military is our priority, and since it is oversized and spread across the globe, we find ourselves increasingly relying on it to protect the corporate interests that rule over the nation. Thus, we are almost guaranteed to get involved in ridiculous, unjustifiable wars like Iraq as a result. And just like with Iraq, Democrats will put up a largely symbolic opposition, but will fail to actually prevent these bad decisions from becoming policy. Indeed, the Democrats keep allowing these kinds of issues to drag on and on. Some Democrats are true believers in the system that we have now, even though it is demonstrably failing us in so many ways, and so of course they cannot be trusted to be serious agents for change.

Unless we demand a serious opposition to what is happening in our nation, we will not see any of these issues truly improve, no matter what party holds the White House, or even Congress. Americans seem hesitant to change this, though.

Until we as a nation show that we have had enough and finally do make the changes, we should expect more of the same. And let's face it, things are likely to get worse, before they ever really get better.

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