Geov Parrish wrote a fine frontpaged diary today called Don’t misunderestimate old-fashioned corruption.
As is my wont these days, I started to write a comment upon it and ended up with a new diary.

Geov’s ideas are right on the money, but how to make them happen…?

The nuts and bolts of how to operate this new machine that we can call Corporate America for want of a better title?

Operate it so that things get done instead of the quagmire-like stasis in which we seem to be mired today?

I have some ideas.

As usual.

Read on…
YES, GEOV!!!

Now let’s take this a little further.

In two directions.

First…how did this situation, this system of endemic corruption, come to pass?

In 1958 Dwight Eisenhower’s chief of staff Sherman Adams was forced to resign because he had accepted the gifts of a vicuna coat and an oriental rug from a Boston textile hustler who was under investigation by the Federal Trade Commission. Things weren’t perfect then, but they were so much better than today in this regard that the mind cannot encompass the scale of difference. We are now deeply into a system of government that is a wholesale kleptocracy, up and down the line.

The change has been gradual, and it has not been confined to politics. In 1958, when you bought a car or a refrigerator you expected it to work. Now you expect it to break. In 1958 when you went to a doctor or a lawyer, when you called the phone company about a problem, when you went to the Board of Education meeting or visited your childrens’ schools or dealt with a large company or organization on ANY level, you expected a fairly high degree of competence.

Now, if you have any sense of how things are operating at all you expect incompetence. As the norm.

I do not mean this to be a “back in the day” rant…there were elements of this society that were horrendous then, too. But overall we have stopped functioning on an effective level of efficiency (as high as it gets anywhere in human society, at least) here in America, and our governmental woes are merely the reflection of a society that has essentially ceased to work very well.

So what I want to ask is…

How has this happened?

And further…

What can we DO about it?

As you so clearly state in your diary, one thing that we CANNOT do is rely upon the Democratic Party to do this for us. It is as bankrupt morally as is the Republican Party, or damned near.

So…what to do?

You write:

The first imperative is to tackle corruption — the real kind, the kind that is more common than oxygen in Washington D.C., so common that even pseudo-critical pundits like Cohen don’t even notice as they breathe it. Clearly, that won’t happen by Congress or the White House getting a sudden burst of conscience. The pressure must come from below, from the 300 million or so Americans, spanning all ideologies and parties, who are tired of taxation without representation. Once upon a time, that was enough to make us launch a revolution. These days, surely, it ought to be enough of an issue to get us enough of us to agitate that we can overthrow our corrupt electoral system, and install something more closely resembling a democracy.

Them’s fightin’ words.

GOOD on ya.

And you have the right ideas…campaign reform being right at the top of the list.

BUT…as you say, “The pressure must come from below, from the 300 million or so Americans, spanning all ideologies and parties, who are tired of taxation without representation.”

Problem.

There are NOT 300 million Americans who are tired of this condition. There are 300 million Americans who are tired of something, but most of them do not have a clue as to what is really bothering them.

And why?

Because they are clattered and cluttered up on an minute-to-minute basis by a media system gone wild, and if we are to effect any change in this country as it stands today, the VERY first thing that we must do is effect a change in that media system.

Now…how can we possibly do this if we cannot elect representatives who are aware of the problem. And we cannot, because the media system will not publicize its own shortcomings.

Catch 22.

Now “Catch 22” the novel was published soon after Sherman Adams took his fall. Joseph Heller saw the very beginnings of America’s fall to nearly total incompetence during W.W. II and he wrote about it so well that his book became almost a work of prophecy. The closed, ridiculous and inefficient system that he described in the book has BECOME America, and you simply can no longer get ANYTHING done here.

What to do, what to do…

In my recent diary BREAKING!!! America Now Bankrupt On Every Level I wrote that “Moral bankruptcy precedes the economic kind more often than not. The United States is headed towards the latter destination, and has already pretty much arrrived at the former”,  and I then went on to sketch out the only tactic that I believe is left to us in this almost totally closed system if we are to be successful in stopping the decline of the United States to the position of debtor nation and its eventual downfall as a nation itself.

This tactic?

A consumer strike against the media. Go read the diary for a fuller exposition of the idea.

Long story short?

If the media is a corporate entity and if it is also the key to reforming this system…those 300 million Americans you mention MUST be somehow made aware of the real difficulties that we are facing instead of being blasted with Weapons of Mass Distraction 24/7 if anything is to change…then the attention of the corporate media must gotten by witholding the one thing that is necessary for a corporation to live.

Profits.

NEWSTRIKE!!!

MEDIASTRIKE!!! AND CONSUMERSTRIKE!!! WHILE WE ARE AT IT.

Once again…

1-We need to get the attention of the American people if anything is to change.

2-The media monster is the single most important roadblock in that effort.

3-The media runs on profits.

4-Withold those profits…and all you really need to do is scare the hamsters who run these corporations with the succesful DEMONSTRATION of consumer power to truly get their attention….and things will change.

My sig on this blog is a quote from Frederick Douglass…one of the few truly great Americans.

Power concedes nothing without a demand; it never has and it never will.

Yup.

But…do we have the will to make that demand? And the intelligence to do so effectively?

If not…we are through.

Through as a nation and through as a culture. I also said in that diary:

No more “United States” within 20 years at the current rate. Northeast…possibly including some of the Great Lakes cities…Southeast, Midwest, South, Southwest and West Coast. Maybe even North West Coast and South West Coast. Separate alliances with Asia, Europe, Canada and South/Central/Caribbean America.

Bet on it.

We have gotten too big, too successful, and hubris is bringing us down, down, down.

This ain’t working.

I mean that.

Either we do this, now…and I see no other practicable alternative, myself, because the political process is broken and the nature of modern warfare makes an armed revolution impossible w/out a total breakdown of the entire system and mass military defections (which would be far worse than what we have at present)…or we are over.

We are at a crux point in history.

America either reinvents itself or goes down the tubes.

And the BEGINNING of that reinvention must travel through the media in this Information Age.

We must wage Information War, thge beginnings of which must be economic.

NEWSTRIKE!!!

VAYA!!!

Go read that diary I mentioned above if you have not done so already.

BREAKING!!! America Now Bankrupt On Every Level.

It’s all there.

VAYA!!!

AG

P.S. Getting their attention. An old joke:

Gold Rush times. Tenderfoot from back east…gonna get rich quick. Buys all the necessaries in a mining town…supplies, clothes, tools, a mule, the works…packs up and heads out. Twenty feet past the town line, the mule sits down, and WILL NOT MOVE. NO amount of persuasion, cajoling, threats, kicks…NOTHING’s gonna move this mule.

An old, tattered prospector and his old, tattered mule approach from the other direction. Old man says “Whatsa matter, there, youngblood? Mule trouble? Lemme have a try.” Walks up to the mule, cups his hand around the mule’s ear, whispers a few words….No response. Tries again, same result.

Steps in front of the mule, gives it a TREMENDOUS whack right in the snout.

The mule keels over as if it had been poleaxed, lies there on the ground w/its eyes all crossed up and rolling, foam coming out of its mouth. The old prospector leans over, cups the mule’s ear, and once again whispers a few words. The mule slowly struggles to its feet, and stands, a little dazed but apparently ready to go.

The tenderfoot says “That’s AMAZING !!! What did you say to that mule?”

The old man answers “Waaall, `tain’t really all that important WHAT y’say to a mule. The IMPORTANT thing is…first y’got t’get their ATTENTION.”

Get their attention.

By any means necessary.

Grab `em by the balls, and their hearts and minds will follow.

And don’t wait for the NY Times and the Washitclean Post.

They’re just in the business of selling more mules.