Let’s step aside from the partisan bickering over taxes, immigration, guns, and sex for a second. These are all hot-button issues, and tend to enflame people’s emotions. People have strong feelings about those issues, which are camera-ready, get plenty of talking points, and easily personal. But our obsessive national focus on these stories, particularly in the for-profit media, also ends up taking up large amounts of our brain space, not to mention our headlines, airtime, and social media.
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The fact that US politics is dominated by these issues tends to obscure other stories. The boring stories. The ones that don’t get front-page billing all that often. Those are the stories about the revolving door of elites that move between government and corporate bureaucracies. These stories are harder to follow, in part because they can put one to sleep. These are the stories that involve numbers – mostly numbers of dollars – and come from investigative committees and reporting. They involve the corrupt relationships between politicians, lobbyists, corporate executives, and special interest groups, including non-profits, that write the laws of the United States, pay the campaigns of ‘democratic’ representatives, and receive the largess of tax-payer government contracts.
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These special interests are the important players of our political game, and they aren’t elected and they don’t vote. They don’t control our system, of course; all complex systems are too thick with links for any few to over-determine the direction of a nation. But on the whole, the money that pours in from all these disparate players adds up like so many gold nuggets on the scale of democracy, and tips the balance from real people toward the fingers dropping the nuggets from on high. And so no matter what kinds of compromises the two parties reach, those compromises will inevitably reflect those gold-dusted fingers, and they will inevitably tip policy toward formulas that currently have the gold.
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At a certain point, this kind of influence ceases to be a righteous form of expression by the ‘successful.’ Instead, it changes the game itself – and we all know the game’s been changed. How do we know? When the players on the field are also the refs and umpires. And that’s where we are now. We got no sacred cows here, no party affiliations, and also no cynicism. We believe this is obvious corruption, and, as such, can be bleached.
No liberating changes to our democracy can appear until we address these different aspects of corruption, for any ordinary people of either political party.
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