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After spending a couple weeks in SE Asia, I’m working hard on putting together an adjusted view of the concept of corruption, and how it effects the way we’re able to live our lives.

The first observation is that nearly all the “westerners” we met had a firm and preconceived notion of what corruption was, and how awful it is in SE Asia. For the most part, they came here prepared to be appalled at the level of corruption in the governments here, and the level of poverty of the people, and they were generally able to find ways to be appalled by exactly what they wanted to be appalled by. In most cases, I think their expectations were exceeded.

Because corruption is certainly evident and destructive over here. They don’t try too hard to hide it.

My second observation was that folks who lived here had the same view of government that most people all over the world have of their own government. That is, they think the government is corrupt, and that folks with money and power find ways to bilk the common folk from whatever they have in order to continue to line the pocketbooks of those who already have money and power. They think that the government is usually nothing more than a tool for those with the money and power.

Hard to disagree with that point of view.

I want to use the term “lifestyle”, but I want to define my use of it first. Most westerners see this word and think it means what kind of car a person drives, how big their house is, how expensive the restaurants are that a person eats at, how elaborate a person’s vacations are, etc. Because for most westerners, that’s how lifestyles are delineated.

But for most of the folks over here, the delineation is far wider than this. There is a wide gap between the masses of folks who work 7 days a week for $5/day if they’re lucky, and the very few who have all the power and wealth.

That said, I think the corruption over here is more offensive to us for two reasons:

1. It seems so much more “wrong” to us that so many live lives of such poverty, while so few skim the bribes at their expense.
2. The corruption is so evident – they don’t know how to hide it well.

I need to noodle on this for a while, and want to write about it. For now, I only want to say that the nature of this whole corruption thing feels a little different than I expected it to feel. It’s nasty and evil without a doubt. Beyond that, though, I’m not sure it stacking itself up in the nice neat little package I’ve been taught to observe.

Back to that Tall Ships post again – this doesn’t fit a pattern I have yet, and I need to noodle through it a bit to see if I can fathom the shapes I think I see out there…

This is so darned simple. It amazes me that the media and politicians can continually make it sound so complex. We’ve dug ourselves into this debt hole over the past 30 years as a result of irresponsibility, demonstrated in 2 ways:

1. First, politicians lower taxes without cutting spending. This is really simple math, and no amount of voodoo economics will make this a different equation than it is.
2. Second, we as voters must bear responsibility for electing the politicians who continually tell us the happy stories about how we can just keep charging things on the credit card without taking accountability for what we’re spending.

It’s no more complex than that. While I might blame the neoliberals for starting us down this path, at some point, we as voters must take accountability for our decision in election after election to vote for the guy who says “cut taxes”, rather than the guy who says “be accountable”. Since politicians learned back in the 80’s that we wouldn’t pay attention to the debt as it ballooned out of control, they just kept playing the game.

The most vicious, underhanded, and filthy of the tricks they played with our money was the theft of money from the Social Security and Medicare trust funds, in order to make the deficit appear smaller than it really was.

When the taxpayers agree to give money to the government for a specific purpose, one responsibility lawmakers have is to make sure the money goes to the purpose the taxpayers agreed. The taxpayer is entrusting money to the lawmakers, with the understanding that the lawmakers won’t skim the money to some end they decide they’d rather fund.

That’s really simple, isn’t it? Somebody argue with me if I’m wrong about this. In this scenario, wouldn’t you consider it theft or embezzlement or at the very least fraud if a lawmaker took money you gave him for one purpose, and just decided to use it for something else?

Back in the 80’s when this started to get out of control, I remember complaining about it to my friends, most of whom claimed to be politically conservative. How, I asked, can a conservative approve of this sort of theft, not to mention that even with the theft, we’re not balancing the budget? “It’s not theft”, they’d reply, “because it’s really just borrowing. The government is simply borrowing money from Social Security in order to temporarily fund other programs and tax cuts – when Social Security needs the money back, the government will give it to them.”

Right. And pigs fly.

So here we are, approaching the place where Social Security will need that money back that Congress has been “borrowing” for the past 30 years. In fact, we recently put ourselves on the express train to that spot, by reducing the amount that we, as taxpayers, pay into Social Security with each paycheck.

Now the moment of truth is fast arriving. If I was right, and this was theft and fraud, then the response of our elected officials will be to tell us that Social Security is rapidly running out of money, and we’re going to need to reduce benefits. If I was wrong, and this is just borrowing, then the response of our elected officials will be to explain to us now how they intend to raise the money to pay back the trillions they’ve “borrowed” from Social Security over the last 30 years.

It’s really that simple. And the answer is……

Listen to President Obama last night in his State of the Union address. No talk of paying that debt back – just talk of how we reduce benefits.

Listen to the news yourself, and see what you hear other elected officials saying. Is anyone talking about the money we need to raise to pay back the loan we owe to Social Security and Medicare? That debt, by the way, is $4.6 Trillion dollars. How on earth will we raise an additional $4.6 trillion, when we can’t even come close to balancing our current budget?

The answer is clear. Our lawmakers have no intention of paying the debts that they’ve incurred. Instead, they’ll simply run away from their responsibility. That makes what’s been happening for the past 30 years theft and embezzlement – plain and simple. I wish I’d been wrong on this one, but current politics is proving me all too right…

The older I get, the more tired I become with these losers we keep sending to Washington – the ones who’re too cowardly to own up to their responsibility to balance the budget they’re put in charge of. They can’t stand up to the taxpayer and tell the taxpayer what he really owes, so like the cowards they are, they keep telling the taxpayer they’ll reduce taxes, knowing all the while that this is irresponsible and cowardly.

They’ll keep taking the money from our elderly, to fund their pet pork projects. When will we get tired enough of this to get rid of these losers?

Well, all the new Republicans that rode into Washington on the backs of tea-party types have wasted no time at all thumbing their noses at the folks they were so happy to court during their campaign.

Remember all that rhetoric about how bad lobbyists were? Turns out that as soon as these new Republicans were sworn in, they jumped right on the “lobby money” bandwagon, sucking up as much of that poison and corruption as they could as fast as they could. Some details here.

Remember that whole “Pledge to America” grandstanding? Turns out that the tea-party types are pretty upset with the new Republicans for selling them out as soon as they got elected. Here is a link to the anger from tea party loyalists. Seems that in particular, it was the (seemingly false) commitment to “act immediately to reducing spending” sticks in the craw of those who thought they were electing conservatives.

Remember the rhetoric about the whole “we the people” stuff? Remember how the tea-party types thought they were electing folks who would represent the interests of the people over the interests of corruption and greed in Washington? They got a rude awakening, as they realize the people they’ve elected may just be the very best lapdogs for those interests opposed to We The People.

Click here for an article describing how the new Republican chairman of the House Financial Services Committee said recently that in his opinion, “Washington and the regulators are there to serve the banks.”  And those silly tea partyers thought these people they elected believed it was the other way around…

It might sound from my tone that I’m down on tea partyers. In many ways I’m actually extremely sympathetic to their cause. At the heart of what they say they stand for, I’m in strong agreement with them. I want fiscal responsibility in Washington. I want a government that represents We The People rather than the right wing corporatist movement fueled by the rise of neoliberalism in our country. I could almost be a tea-partyer.

Almost.

In general, this whole notion that the tea party had that it was somehow representing the interests of We The People over the interests of the forces of the corruption and corporatism in our nation was sadly misled by some of the worst offenders of the interests of We The People, and some of those former tea partyers are starting to see that. Forces of corruption and greed were extremely happy to see some more friendly allies arrive in Washington this month, and have promptly dumped wheelbarrows full of cash in their laps to help in the effort to undue those things they hate the most – such as efforts to more tightly regulate Wall Street to reduce the risk of the sort of catastrophe that led to the trillion dollars of bank bailouts that Congress and the President leaped to provide back in 2007. (Let’s see, who had most of the power when that abomination of tax-dollar appropriation was enacted?) Here’s an article that goes into detail about those wheelbarrows of cash being dumped in the laps of these “new Republicans”, and how it’s grating many in the tea party who supported them.

While I feel bad for friends who were so mercilessly duped in this last election. I do hope it will help redirect folks who truly believe in those core conservative principles. Maybe as we start to gear up for the next election, many of those folks who were duped by the right wing will look a little more deeply at the candidates and the issues next time around.

It comes to this: Conservatives in this country need to reject this new-republicanism. How many times must we be duped and dumped on before we realize that there’s nothing conservative about the right wing, and yet this extreme right wing has taken over the Republican party over the last 30 years.

We need to go through a cleansing, and reject the likes of Boehner, hypocrites who talk all day about how bad things like universal healthcare are, yet can’t wait to sign up for their own government healthcare program – the one that I pay for as a taxpayer. If the Republican Party continues to put forward extremists and hypocrites, it’s time to sit vote for someone else until they put forward the real conservatives again.

Next time around, I’ll be looking carefully at the tea party groups. Maybe they’ve learned a hard lesson here, and maybe the real conservatives will come from their ranks next time. Unfortunately, this last time around, they were the ones who supported some of the most extreme hypocrites now lapping up corruption, greed, and lobbyists.

Tell Me Again Why You Ran For The Office?

Front page of my Denver Post this morning, a story about the newly elected Secretary of State (Scott Gessler – R) who’d decided that he can’t live on the salary the job pays. His old job was with a law firm that represented clients on elections and campaign law issues, and apparently paid him a lot more than this new public service job pays him.

I get that – he decided he wanted to go into public service. It’s a tough row to hoe these days, as we’ve gone through a few decades of demonizing public employees and reducing their pay dramatically in relation to the private sector.

Was somebody twisting Gessler’s arm to make him spend all that money to run for Secretary of State? He was (presumably) smart enough to check into the salary he’s make before he spent all that money convincing the voters that he was the best guy for the job, right?

But now, he says he can’t live on a paltry $68,500 / year, and he wants to moonlight with his old firm to make more money. Hey, I agree that’s not much money. So why’d he run?

Aside from the issues of conflict of interest when he’s working for this private law firm who represents clients who he’s likely to oppose, I have some more basic problems with what he’s doing. Like issues of accountability.

Hey Gessler, you ran for the office, and unless you’re willing to tell us you were too stupid to check out the salary ahead of time, I think you need to be accountable to your decision to ask us to entrust the office to you. Do your job. It’s a full-time job. As one Colorado voter, I expect you to do the job I elected you to do, and not to be working a second job.

Don’t like the pay? I get it. So either try and get the salary raised, or quit. Hand the job over to whoever took second place in the election. These are public service jobs you’re running for, and these days, that means you don’t make much money at it. If you don’t like that, then change it, but don’t slap the voters in the face by getting us to chose you, then telling us you were just kidding – you really can’t live on what we were offering to pay you.

Can we get a little accountability from our elected officials? The Secretary of State is the one I’d expect the most accountability from for crying out loud.

January 21, 2010 – Activist Supreme Court vs We The People

Today was the anniversary of a dark moment in American history. It was one year ago today that an activist and extreme Supreme Court decided to open the floodgates of corruption and greed in our country, completely turning the concept of citizenship and freedom on its head in this great nation.

Of course, I’m speaking of the disastrous Citizens United ruling by 5 extreme and activist Supreme Court justices. In this ruling, 5 justices decided that money is the same thing as speech, and a corporation can spend unlimited money to assure they have greater voice than ordinary citizens. Corporations in our country control the vast majority of the wealth of the nation, and they are answerable to nobody except their private shareholders. With this wealth, they’re able to bribe and lobby their way into the bowels of lawmaking in the country, completely unfettered in their efforts to buy and control the government of our nation.

The Citizens United ruling opened the door to a form of fascism where the only people who are able to wield power and influence in our country are those with wealth. The last election cycle already shows the chilling effects of this dark decision, as money played an unprecedented role in electing those whose job it is to represent We The People.

Throughout history, it’s always been the wealthy who have the most influence. Just a fact of life. However, when this great nation that I love was set up, it was set up in a way to reduce that tendency toward corruption. In our new nation, the wealthy weren’t able to silence We The People. The common man had the same voice as the wealthy man. Nobody could stifle speech – it was illegal. Since everyone had equal access to voice their opinion, and everyone’s vote counted equally, we had a democratically elected republic that worked.

Until the Supreme Court fell into the hands of the extremists who promote corporatism. Now, we’ve established a modified version of our Constitution and Bill of RIghts. Now, the people who have the only loud voice in our nation are those with wealth, because they’re the ones who have the money it takes to buy the airwaves. It was bad enough that the airwaves were controlled by those with great wealth to start with, making it inherently difficult for a fair message to be expressed. With this ruling, we’ve made it abundantly clear that the only folks who have the right to be widely heard in this nation are those with wealth.

Full disclosure here. I’m registered as a Republican. I’m a small business owner. I started my first small business when I was in my 20’s, and that was many decades ago. During my career, I’ve run businesses large and small across corporate America. I’m a dyed-in-the-wool Capitalist. I love free enterprise.

And I love a free nation and a free democracy. Once we allow our democracy to be enslaved to the corporatists, we’ve not only lost our representative form of government, we’re also on our way to losing our freedoms. After that, every small businessperson in America will lose their ability to compete in business with the giants, because it will be the giants who run the sham of a government that they own. As a small businessman, I can tell you I feel that we’re well on our way to that state now.

The overturn of this ruling should be the number one priority of every true conservative in this nation. It should be the number one priority of every small businessperson in America. It should be the number one priority of the tea party. It should be the number one priority of every true patriot who loves what this country once stood for, and what it’s rapidly retreating from.