Washington DC is out of touch with reality

Americans are angry with both political parties and their President because they see Washington DC operating in an alternate reality completely removed from the rest of the country and world.

During all of 2009, unemployment steadily increased to “unprecedented” levels (to use a favorite word of the President). Growing under-employment, despondency by many long-term laid-off workers, and general job insecurity by those still employed also set new records. Most people prefer meaningful jobs that help build a prosperous future. Instead they worry about how they will subsist when savings, meager unemployment, and food stamps run out.

The TARP banking sector bailout and the massive Stimulus Bill have not produced many positive, tangible or visible signs of improvement on “Main Street” or in the lives of most people. Instead home foreclosures continue to mount and soon the majority of U.S. homeowners will have mortgages exceeding the value of their properties. Watching their retirement savings shrink precipitously, and more businesses stagnate, fail, close, or move operations overseas from 2007 through 2009, have not been positive diversions for most Americans either.

Adding insult to injury, our sociopathic bankers and financial speculators have set aside billions in “profits” to pay huge bonuses to their top executives and managers. This is occurring while their continuing existence (rather than normal bankruptcy liquidation) is due solely to massive public infusions of capital, subsidized loans and rock-bottom interest rates from the Federal Reserve, and public guarantees for their bad assets and loans. Contrarily most small businesses and households have seen their credit lines slashed or cancelled. New loans are rejected not because the applicants are not qualified but because the banks don’t trust anyone. They now prefer to invest in safe Treasury Notes, rather than help in the recovery of the U.S. economy.

Yet for most of 2009 (after passing a stimulus bill that has yet to spend most of its authorized funds on programs designed to rebuild infrastructure and create some new jobs) Congress has done very little. The President may have made many speeches and various policy proposals, but none have been enacted. Time stands still in Washington while day in and day out the relentlessly deep recession continues to take its heavy toll on tens of millions of households and small businesses across the country.

Instead we have witnessed an incredibly slow, tedious, dilatory, odious, wholly special-interest dominated, and completely surreal partisan kabuki-dance debate over healthcare reform. Even at the start of 2010, nothing has been resolved except we have 2 incredibly complex Rube-Goldberg healthcare reform proposals that even if they could be reconciled with each other and passed as one bill, will not even become effective until after 2013. No real sense of urgency is evident even here.

Congressional dalliance for almost an entire calendar year debating healthcare reform while ignoring ever-mounting unemployment, home foreclosures, business failures, and the theft of public funds by our sociopathic financial sector, is not unlike a family ignoring that half the house is engulfed by a massive fire by turning to a discussion about purchasing new matching kitchen appliances.

Naturally the electorate is incensed, furious, frustrated, and angry with Congress, Washington, Wall Street, both political parties, and the President. The public understands that there are many problems facing the country, but they expect their elected officials to be able to prioritize them correctly and then act accordingly with some sense of urgency. It’s not that Congress is doing too many things, it isn’t doing much of anything – and what it chooses to address is not properly prioritized to match the real needs of the electorate.

People are angry at “Big Government” because it has become completely ineffectual, clueless, and beholden only to the best interests of the country’s wealthiest individuals and largest corporate enterprises. There is a natural inclination is to question the taxes paid to and the size of government because it is not responding to the basic needs of the vast majority of Americans.

A calm, honest, civil and informed discussion about the purposes of government, the real causes of the financial and economic collapse, the inter-connected global challenges facing the country, understanding regulated free enterprise and unregulated monopolies, and analyzing specific spending and taxation levels and policies, cannot take place in this desperate economy or completely polarized political environment People naturally question the intelligence of Congress when it completely ignores the raging fire of our massive economic mess in favor of exclusively discussing the highly complex but obviously lesser priority of healthcare reform.

We didn’t vote for our representatives to aimlessly debate ad infinitem and ad nauseum the best ways to please all the conflicting demands of our corporate oligarchy and their big campaign contributors, and still end up with systemic paralysis and inaction year after year. We expect them to represent those living and real human beings who actually go to the polls and pull the levers in our representational democracy with some sense of urgency dictated by the 2-year national election cycle.

Perhaps the recent Supreme Court decision permitting corporations to spend unlimited amounts of money for or against any person running for Federal office (but requiring the disclosure of the identities of those advertising and sponsoring businesses) may finally enrage enough Americans that they will take action. Many of us felt, suspected or actually understood that this country has been devolving into an undemocratic corporate republic, and our economy has become a corrupt crony capitalism known as corporatism. These are complete perversions of the Constitution, real democracy and the free market system. However, many people probably needed to be shown this sad reality explicitly and directly.

The Supreme Court has succeeded in pulling away all the curtains and secret back-room connections that have long obscured the de-factor merger in Washington DC between our greedy, short-sighted, narcissistic, self-serving, incompetent, and wholly arrogant political parties, the Fortune 500, Wall Street and big financial institutions, large energy and insurance companies, and the organizations associated with the Military Industrial Complex. To realize that corporations (that are “legal fictions” created by the state with special tax treatment, limited liability, and perpetual existence to encourage business enterprises) are now fully equal to human beings for civil rights protections and privileges under the Constitution should make anyone sick.

If business enterprises can spend freely to support or oppose any individual running for public office, then people may react with complete skepticism, mistrust and anger towards such attempts to pervert free elections. People might just vote for candidates in exactly the opposite way from what the majority of corporations advocate in their protected “free speech” advertising. We might not be able to boycott the goods and services of the corporations in retaliation for their political positions, but we may decide that anything or anyone big business is for or against, we the people should vote in direct opposition.

It’s not that people believe large private companies any more than their politicians, professional organizations, public or private institutions, used car salesmen, or even each other. Perhaps this complete mistrust of everything is a long-overdue healthy maturing of our society and nation. Many pundits, commentators, and bloggers fear that the electorate will slavishly believe every lie and falsehood presented by business advertisers. The current huge anger of the American electorate might be strong evidence that they are finally realizing the utter bi-partisan corruption and incompetence that resides in Washington DC and in many of our State Capitals.

Most mature adults are capable of handling pessimism, failure, disappointment and mistrust. No public or private institution should be exempt from criticism and periodic “full-body” scrutiny. No elected official should ever feel safe that he or she can hold office perpetually regardless of party affiliation, wealthy supporters, and gerrymandered districts. No corporation or public servant should have the arrogance or hubris to think they can dictate to the American people and to rule without listening to their concerns and getting their informed consent.

The Supreme Court may have insured an awakening of the American electorate by showing the real operating facts that currently control national public policy this country. By naively using the perverse logic that large amounts of money do not distort the electoral process if free speech concerns are asserted, most Americans will eventually see through the absurdity of such a meritless argument when applied to real life.

We desperately need to change our national and state election rules and procedures to open them up to candidates and parties not affiliated with either major party. Democracy requires that voters have meaningful choices in candidates. We should not tolerate a false and fabricated selection process limited to only 2 political parties that may just be opposite sides of the same coin that is surreptitiously determined by a corrupt oligarchy and manipulative private corporations that care nothing for the best long-term interests of the American people.

It may take two or three election cycles for reality to sink in. Ultimately a fully informed and engaged electorate must determine at the ballot box who decides how this country is to be governed and what type of nation we will leave to our children.

Marc Pascal, ranting from Phoenix, AZ