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Despotism, to reach the soul, clumsily struck at the body, and the soul, escaping such blows, rose gloriously above it. Such is not the course adopted by tyranny in democratic republics. There the body is left free, and the soul is enslaved.-- Alexis de Tocqueville
"Laws are for those who can't afford to break them."
-- from cartoon ridiculing the Batman movies
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The US political system is a highly evolved form of institutionalized corruption. It takes a great deal of money, millions of dollars, to get elected to even fairly low-level posts. Candidates are investments, and the investors are paying for the candidates' services. What the candidates offer for sale are our votes. The investors only invest if they believe that they will get a good return on their investment, that is, if they are convinced that the candidates can deliver our votes. There is never any question of whose interests the candidates will serve if elected.
Politicians are professional liars. The task for a candidate is to persuade the voters that he (sometimes she) has their interests at heart, when in fact he does not, and the investor that he will be able to deliver the votes. Voters enable politicians to do the bidding of wealthy investors, not vice-versa.
We have no politics. There is but one political party, the Property Party, and it represents the millionaires. There is no form of representation for anyone else. The Property Party has so-called Democrat and Republican factions. These two factions represent different power blocks among the millionaires, but they do not represent fundamentally different philosophies about anything.
The closest the two factions come to principled difference is in their approaches to those they do not represent. The Democrats take the noblesse oblige approach to power, while the Republican faction believes in winner-take-all. However, both scapegoat their own victims, and neither can conceive of policies contrary to the interests of centralized wealth, regardless of the expense in human, environmental, or any other terms. There is no debate between the factions about what kind of system we should have, only about which particular clan of blood-soaked billionaires should get most of the gravy this time around.
Voting is pointless. There is nothing seriously at stake in any election, and if there could be, elections would be illegal. Elections are mostly contests between the affluent and the opulent, debates in which the disenfranchised have no stake and by which the enfranchised are never seriously threatened. The only real progress we've made has come as a result of mass-based political movements, when thousands of people have gotten off their asses to demand changes. That's how we abolished slavery, eliminated child labor, created general labor rights, instated women's voting rights, got rid of Jim Crow, outlawed DDT and instigated some modicum of enviromental protection, and succeeded in pretty much everything else that is not contemptible in US history. The "free market" likes nothing better than the absolute power to exploit, abuse, rob, expropriate, and plunder; and to silence, enslave, emprison, or just kill any who would object. We get the politics we are collectively willing to accept. But voting and party politics have never generated anything progressive for anyone, though they are certainly lucractive enough for the con men and women who run them.
So what? These facts are not too surprising or even interesting. I put them on my web site merely because I get tired of what passes for politics in the media. We live in perhaps the most highly and successfully propagandized society in human history. My only real point is that the emperor wears no clothes, a fact that is painfully obvious to anyone who has not been completely indoctrinated.
Cartoons on voting:
This Modern World
(from Tom Tomorrow's
website)
Ted Rall (from his website)
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