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Politics : PRESIDENT GEORGE W. BUSH -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: ColtonGang who wrote (157460)	7/3/2001 4:34:13 PM
From: ColtonGang	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 769667

Gore Vidal had the political system pegged alright.....read on: The fact that the United States was never intended to be a democracy is so well known that it is now completely forgotten. (Hence the familiar, grinding incantation of our opinion makers: "We are the greatest democracy on earth, with the widest range of detergents, etc.") The most candid of the Founding Fathers, John Jay, put their opinion on the matter in an artless but truthful way: "The people who own the country ought to run it." James Madison, a preacher's son, poured unction over this when he acknowledged demurely and approvingly the iron law of oligarchy that invariably comes to govern parliaments, congresses, and nations. The few will always control the many through manufactured opinion, which bedazzles and confuses the many when it is not just plain dumbing them down into the dust of what Spiro Agnew called "The greatest nation in the country." Nevertheless, a truly popular opinion is beginning to coalesce in the perpetual shadow of manufactured opinion: our system of electing politicians to office is rotten and corrupted to its core, because organized money has long since replaced organized people as the author of our politics. And most of it comes from rich people and corporations, who now own our political process-lock, stock, and pork barrel. Some nuts and bolts. Of the billions now spent each election cycle, most is donated in checks of $1,000 or more. But less than one-tenth of one percent of the general population make individual contributions at this rate. These happy few are prepared to pay a high and rising price for the privilege of controlling our government. In the 1998 election cycle, the average winning House candidate cost the owners about $600,000. The average winning Senate candidate a bit over $5 million. Multiply both figures by two if you want the cost of dislodging an incumbent from office(in a system where, last time around, over 97 percent were re-elected. To finance a race in big media markets like New York, or California, it's a bit more expensive: as of election day 1998, something like $36 and $21 million respectively. And if they tire of buying others, of course, the rich can buy political offices for themselves. In its truly Caligulaesque Buckley v. Valeo decision, our Supreme Court, ever eager to extend their eccentric notion of democracy, ruled that the rich have every right to spend as much of their own money as they like to buy an office. Hence, a demi-billionaire like Herb Kohl could campaign as "Nobody's Senator but Yours!", meaning not "yours" but "mine," and win. Do the many really hold the opinions of the few who own the political process? It would seem not since only half the eligible voters can bring themselves to vote in a Presidential election while only a third vote in off-year congressional elections. On dark days, I incline to what Henry Adams wrote at the start of "our" century. "The whole fabric of society will go to wrack, if we really lay hands of reform on our rotten institutions… From top to bottom, the whole system is a fraud, all of us know it, laborers and Capitalists alike and all of us are consenting parties to it." Thus, business (Henry's Adam's "it") gets back much more from government than it actually invests in the process while the citizens don't even get a national health service.

To: ColtonGang who wrote (157460)	7/3/2001 4:39:35 PM
From: CYBERKEN	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 769667

Actually, while Australia was penal colony, the "criminals" who settled in the original American colonies were exclusively religious "criminals", guilty of worshiping the wrong faith during and right after the Thirty Year's War. The were followed by indentured servants-sons who were too far away from the birthright to inherit the pig trough back home. Then came the refugees from the worlds of famine and war. Today it's medical, scientific, engineering students who want to study where the state-of-the-art in technology thrives in freedom. It's also entrepreneurs, who find our economy fertile ground, despite the American left's feverish attempts to destroy it...