What is this mad conversation about the Democratic Party doing nothing for we, the people?
What is this roundelay about Democrats voting for war in Iraq, staying the course, cutting taxes, slashing public programs, ramping up military spending, passing medieval bankruptcy laws, and generally acting like Republican-lite? Acting like they’ve joined the other side?
Are we really? Are we really still having this conversation about center right or right of center or moderate liberal and what these words mean? Whether they mean what we say they mean, or mean something else?
Is Alice still sipping tea at table, and hoping to discern a direction from the Mad Hatter’s discourse?
Omigod.
Look away. Take your eyes off the White Rabbit, and be free. There is no earthly good to come of following a fantasy down a dark hole. Take the pill that makes you larger. Wake up. Come over here and look at this.
Our national politics is all hologram. It’s a penny dreadful. It’s a Tee-Vee soap opera. If you think the jailing of the entire Bush Administration will change the power structure in Washington, you’re still sipping tea with Alice. Put that down. There’s a lot of Kool-Aid in that cup.
Politicians only represent money and power. They are not the money and power.
You are. You and the other point three billion Americans.
But you let yourself be raped and robbed rather than pick up the tab for your politicians.
So, they are hired by people with far less money and power than you have – corporations and wealthy investors. You own the whole show, but you let a few thousand extremely wealthy people run the show.
Now that’s surreal.
Discussing the maneuvers and gyrations of our national politicians as if they are real people is like discussing soap opera stars as if their daytime dramas are genuine events.
When you hear housewives in the checkout line at the supermarket discussing whether Marisol will lose her baby, you just smile. You know Marisol has no baby, not really. She has a pillow under her house dress, and she’s working up crocodile tears for the camera. She’s throwing dishes and weeping and running her mascara and screaming threats and curses but you know she really just works for a living on a sound stage somewhere. You know Marisol does the soap opera thing in exchange for good money.
If you tell the housewives in the checkout line how it really is, they will roll their eyes and agree with you, and then get right back to discussing `our soaps.’
Do you not see that it’s precisely the same with our national politicians, of both parties? Their TV show is in Washington, DC, that’s all. They don’t own the sound stage, they just work there. You own the sound stage, but you are so engrossed in the throwing of dishes and weeping that you forget to call the shots. Clever people have stepped in to do that for you, for their own immense benefit.
They’re called campaign donors, and they are not we the people. They are the wealthiest 5% of the populace, and the biggest, wealthiest corporations on the planet, and in all of world history. They call the shots because you don’t.
The call the shots while you won’t.
Politicians only represent real money and power. They are hired to represent money and power. If you want a clear view of our American politics, just replace the word Elected with the word Hired whenever you hear or see it. Things get real simple when you do.
You would not keep an attorney who said one thing and did another. But because of the mystique of the word Elected we let our politician do exactly that, for their entire term, and then we vote for them again because they are someone we’d like to have a beer and watch a ball game with. They’re a celebrity. They’re special. They wear thousand dollar suits and get on TV. They know better for us than we do ourselves.
Sheesh.
Is that how you’d hire a lawyer to defend your home and nest egg from con men? Then why do you put up with it in your hired politician?
And why do you cry about it when your politician is two-faced? You did not pay his campaign tab. What on earth makes you think he works for you?
Marisol is an actress. Step away from the Kool-Aid.
Our national politics has evolved into image building through extremely expensive and increasingly dumbed down media campaigns. TV campaigns and press coverage of `the horse race’ for the Oval Office. Or any office. Polls, sound bites, landing on carriers, long screams, codpieces and culture war. Throwing dishes and weeping.
Would you hire a lawyer who throws dishes and weeps to get your business? Hell, no. But you’d vote for him.
Candidates for national offices are celebrities, not real people. Like Marisol, to succeed they must succeed on TV. They must perform scripts; they must build a national persona, a celebrity image in the public eye. They must be divas, for we Americans only elect celebrities. Under our TV political system, only well known people, only people who are famous for being famous – have any hope of garnering votes.
Once you are famous for being famous, you’re practically elected already.
A politician’s actual ideas, views and positions are irrelevant and impediments to this election process. The only thing that matters about their actual positions is whether they move off the shelf, whether they sell or don’t. If they don’t sell, the campaign ceases shortly thereafter from lack of further donated funds.
So — you find out what sells, and you sell what sells. That’s how you get there. That’s the only way you get there.
Huey Long knew that, and so did Barry Goldwater. It seems to have escaped you.
If Marisol steps out of character, if she stops throwing dishes and shows us the pillow, she is written out of the story as soon as possible. The story goes right ahead, with other actors. Marisol knows this, and so she loves her pillow and fondles it dearly, and she feels it kick on occasion. For you. All for you.
Not two hundred Americans actually know any one of these national politicians in any way except their performance on TV. By the numbers alone, that makes them images of who we think they are, not who they are. We are fascinated by their weeping and throwing of kitchen utensils, and we discuss them in the checkout line at the supermarket. And we vote for the celebrity image we like.
What our politicians do in front of TV cameras is done to get and hold on to their job. They are paid to do it, just like Marisol is. Their compensation is the tens of millions in gifted dollars that is needed to gain their national office through TV image building campaigns. That is the only way you get there.
Their compensation is a high-salaried job in Washington, plus fame, power, a lifetime pension, and access to even more money and power in the future from the wealthy people who pick up the tab for their campaigns, which gets them repeatedly into office. The politician is on the gravy train now. They are set for life as long as they stay on the gravy train. As long as they project that image, that persona, for the people in the checkout line.
A politician’s image as a selfless public servant is their projected persona, their hologram, their soap opera character. When that `On Air’ light blinks off, they become themselves again. They don’t allow cameras into the bathroom to record them handling their bodily functions, nor do they allow cameras into the backroom to record them handling their business functions for their campaign contributors. For the people who picked up their tab.
Our national politicians campaign and win by portraying a scripted image of what we have told them in focus groups we want to hear. They broadcast an image of themselves as someone who can deliver what we wished for, and so we vote for them, and then they go to Washington and sit down with the people who actually picked up the tab for that image-building campaign.
They don’t sit down with you. You didn’t pick up their tab. You are a fan, not a client.
Politicians find out what their contributors want done, and they do it if they want to stay in office another term, then another, then another. Stay on the gravy train until you have yours. Stay on it forever if you are Dick Cheney.
What did you think – they went to Washington to work for you? You didn’t put `em there, brother – investor and corporate money did, in your place. You just followed the white rabbit to the polling booth. You voted for Marisol. You voted for an image of a public servant, not a real public servant. You took the pill that makes you small.
You didn’t pick up their tab, so the elected party does not actually work for you.
TV has turned national conversation and consensus into a one way street. As Al Gore so eloquently explained last week, TV drives conventional wisdom wherever it wants to, and it does it through bombardments of images and messages. Throw enough money at it, and the public will move to your position. They assume everyone else already has.
National politics is a soap opera. The idea of two competing national political parties is a sound stage illusion. They both use the same bathroom, they both head to the same backroom to do the same business functions for the people who paid for their campaigns.
The disconnect is getting to be extreme, and yet the conventional wisdom is that there are two parties vying wholeheartedly to serve the taxpayers honestly and fairly — those good and honest folks in the checkout line, those fine apple pie eaters in the voting booth.
That’s horse apple pie.
Our Hologram Government now stands for mom and apple pie and a divine mission to spread McFreedom across the oil-bearing portions of the globe through military force. Our real government is a privately held corporation, owned at the moment by whichever wealthy investors and corporate interests most recently ponied up hundreds of millions of dollars for the most recent media campaigns and elections.
Those campaigns created images of candidates in the public eye, inspiring about half the populace to come out and vote for one or the other. The votes were then washed through Diebold and ES&S, and once again, Marisol won. On both sides. Yay.
From the gerrymandering of voting districts beforehand, to focus group image campaigning, to computer counted votes afterwards, to one of a kind SCOTUS rulings, there is virtually nothing left of the public debate of ideas – real world ideas — that the first 150 years of the American Republic so benefited from. There is no verifiable vote count, either. Money and power controls the image-making media, and the voting booths, and the country. That money and power is not you, when it should be.
Some empty suits came in and took your place while you were watching Marisol throw dishes and hug her budding baby.
Now I ask you – if the rings and rocker arms on your old Chevy pickup are shot, then it follows that your Chevy needs an engine overhaul.
Now I ask you — if the machinery and methods of our Old Republic are shot, then it follows that the Old Republic needs an engine overhaul.
Well, our Old Republic is gone. Gone into a hologram projected on the flag, a hologram of mom and apple pie and a rifle in the hands of a young shave tail trooper in some desert foxhole, defending an oil well. For who? Who knows — it’s only important that we finish the job.
That’s us now. Kind of brings a tear to your eye, don’t it? I hear angels singing, and the steady bass beat of a bible thumping in the background.
If this doesn’t sound like your kind of parade, then you need to change the arrangement you made with your politician. You made it by voting for Marisol and leaving the check on the table. You could have hired him, not them. You are the real money and the power. Not him, and not the corporate donors who took your empty chair some years back.
It’s a simple arrangement. Make it so.
Our national government is currently the private property of the investors and corporations who paid for the media campaigns that put our current politicians in office. Those politicians now write laws and regulations that favor these investors and corporations.
It’s an utterly simple arrangement.
Our national government has been privatized.
The only real world conversation to be had about our national political scene is to change who pays for these political campaigns. Change who picks up the tab.
Make another utterly simple arrangement. To our benefit this time. Pick up the tab.
If our national politicians were only allowed to get campaign funding from an anonymous taxpayer fund – say $100 million per Senator, Representative, and President – they would answer to taxpayers as naturally as cows come back to the barn at feeding time.
And it would cost us a hell of a lot less than the current corporate raping of our nation that is going on under these so-called public servants so cheerfully dishing our children’s futures into the corporate trough. They’ll be out of office when our grandkids are born — born with well over $133,000 of national debt to pay off before they ever see a penny of their own.
Did you vote for that? No. Did you hire your politician to vote for that? No. You voted for Marisol. He was hired by the corporations at the trough.
If you don’t like this arrangement you’ve made, then make another one. You are the money and the power.
The goal of politicians elected by public monies alone, and living on public monies alone, would be to serve the public interest alone. It would not be their getting back into office with donated corporate money, earned in exchange for letting lobbyists write laws for politicians to pass in the dead of night without ever reading them.
Let’s do it. Let’s make another utterly simple arrangement.
Let’s arrange that politicians get taxpayer money to campaign on, and travel on, and live on. They are hired by the people at large, through verifiable voting on paper ballots.
And if they accept even one dollar in cash, goods or services from any private source, for any reason, they are discharged from their office immediately, and disbarred from running for political office ever again. An utterly simple arrangement.
As simple as the laws for jury tampering. If your lawyer took money from your opponent in a civil case, would you keep that lawyer? Why do you keep a politician who does that?
Because he’s a celebrity. He was elected. He’s above us now. He’s above the law. He’s a soooper star.
That’s horse apple pie. That’s Kool-Aid in your cup.
Let’s all thank Alice for the tea, and let’s get back to the real world. We have only ourselves to blame for putting Marisol and her pillow and her dishes in office. We’re watching the show — when we own the show, and the whole damned studio.
We have only to demand that we, the people, pick up the entire tab after this, and no one else, no one else, and we will have our Old Republic back. Until we hire our politicians, they will not work for us; and they will continue to rape us for the people who did hire them.
There’s the rabbit hole, and there’s the real world. We can have some more pie and Kool-Aid, and watch Marisol, or we can fire these clowns and hire people to represent only us.
Pick up the tab, or bend over.