Indications that the US political system is completely bankrupt can be seen in yesterday’s predictable Supreme Court ruling that allows corporate interests free reign to buy elections.
Lobbyists Get Potent Weapon in Campaign Finance Ruling
By DAVID D. KIRKPATRICK
Published: January 21, 2010WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court has handed a new weapon to lobbyists. If you vote wrong, a lobbyist can now tell any elected official that my company, labor union or interest group will spend unlimited sums explicitly advertising against your re-election.
“We have got a million we can spend advertising for you or against you — whichever one you want,’ ” a lobbyist can tell lawmakers, said Lawrence M. Noble, a lawyer at Skadden Arps in Washington and former general counsel of the Federal Election Commission.The decision seeks to let voters choose for themselves among a multitude of voices and ideas when they go to the polls, but it will also increase the power of organized interest groups at the expense of candidates and political parties.
It is expected to unleash a torrent of attack advertisements from outside groups aiming to sway voters, without any candidate having to take the criticism for dirty campaigning. The biggest beneficiaries might be well-placed incumbents whose favor companies and interests groups are eager to court. It could also have a big impact on state and local governments, where a few million dollars can have more influence on elections.
The ruling comes at a time when influence-seekers of all kinds have special incentives to open their wallets. Amid the economic crisis, the Obama administration and Congressional Democrats are trying to rewrite the rules for broad swaths of the economy, from Detroit to Wall Street. Republicans, meanwhile, see a chance for major gains in November.
Democrats predicted that Republicans would benefit most from the decision, because they are the traditional allies of big corporations, who have more money to spend than unions.
Right now the corporate establishment is spending billions in Washington to influence banking and healthcare legislation, the outcomes are toothless bank regulation and the current healthcare ‘reform’ monstrosity. The proposed legislation fixes nothing. Consequently, finance is on its deathbed and visiting the doctor is now a luxury similar to buying and operating an America’s Cup yacht.
Meanwhile, back at the ranch, the voters in Massachusetts filled Ted Kennedy’s vacant US Senate seat with a tea- bagging, climate change denying Newt Gingrich clone. Talk about jumping out of the frying pan into another frying pan!
This is how politics is working or not working: the ship of state is taking water. The country needs a bucket, it has rejected the knitting needles and has chosen the flyswatter. Instead of a Senator who can throw the fear of god into corporate interests the country is saddled with another corporatist hack.
A hack similar to the Republican elected to the governorship in the State of Virginia. Our bi- polar politics of social exclusion and economics of denial are serving the country badly. The controls of state have been set by the business inepts to the ‘Broken’ position. As every day passes another 75 million barrels of crude oil are pointlessly destroyed with the byproducts spewed into the atmosphere. As nothing is done to address real problems, the severity of the inevitable consequences is amplified. As the situation declines, the stupidity of the administrators increases. The more broken things become, the greater the public clamor for more of the same. The entire public function cycle is perverse. Proposed solutions are worse in effect than are the problems the solutions set out to solve.
Inflating gigantic finance and real estate bubbles didn’t solve the energy waste issue but rather accelerated energy waste while saddling national balance sheets with trillions in debt.
The US has been in energy denial for decades. The increase in debt was Ronald Reagan’s solution to the energy crisis of the 1970’s. It was America’s conservation plan – as it was Japan’s. Increasing debt requires energy available in the future adequate to providing returns needed to repay the debts. Because available energy has been declining for ten years, Japan – along with other consuming nations such as Greece, Portugal, Spain and Ireland – are facing debt service costs that are spiraling toward default and repudiation. Hiring reactionary business advocates of ‘free market’ energy consumption cannot alter the physics of depletion and the ‘Economics of Less’ regardless of their charisma.
Tthe US body politic has yet to hit bottom. The cyclic veering between ‘Tweedle Dee’ and ‘Tweedle Dumb’ candidates accomplishes less than leaving the positions vacant. At this point the abilities of various establishment candidates to run effective campaigns is irrelevant. President Obama is a shining example that a talented, charismatic campaigner can be a bumbling and ineffective administrator. The electoral process itself is broken. Only well- connected business candidates offering endless growth strategies are able to compete for votes. The barriers to entry to unconventional candidates is now impossibly high. As a non- consumption strategy becomes increasingly necessary, the ability of the establishment to thwart this direction increases. Business has the money, it has captured regulators and the courts and compromised governance at all levels. Corruption and little else … matters.
Change will take place only when all the ‘Growth Theories’ are demonstrable failures. This will require years of frustrating and hopeless trial and error. The long and expanding laundry list of ever more destructive ‘free market’ industrial growth strategies must be attempted first then exhausted. The level of ruin promised by this process is daunting but the fantastic ‘political realities’ allow no other course of action.
Just as ‘stimulus programs’ is expressed as added miles of redundant and unrepairable freeway lanes in an era when auto use is shrinking, politics is now expressed as increasing reinforcements for the failure of the status quo. The people are angry; they are angry because the system that has taken over their lives to the smallest detail is falling apart. The peoples’ desires are self- contradictory. The means to satisfy the corporate- created desires of all the people – plus the Chinese, the Indians, the rising Asians and all the rest – are diminished past the point of no return.
Sometime in the future the public will realize the economic troubles that burden this world originate in industry and consumption. Between now and that time, there will be torrents of lies and propaganda from the vested interests blaming ‘liberals’ and ‘Peak Oil Theorists’ and ‘environmentalists’. The new Court ruling is a part of the piece, an enabler for this propaganda. Denial will become more and more entrenched, even as the various financial markets themselves indicate the true – energy based – nature of our complaints.
An essential ingredient to our social unravelling is for institutions to become increasingly unresponsive. Europe and America denied the reality of Hitler and Japanese expansionism for years prior to the outbreak of World War Two. The public is eager to embrace the failed development strategies that pitched us to the edge of bankruptcy in the first place. This desire is coupled with incompetence at administrative levels. Business is just as guilty of embracing failed strategies as is government. Business’s inability to reform itself away from failed finance practices is noteworthy. What is left is for the markets themselves to do the heavy lifting.
Markets alone cannot reset the controls or provide anything more than an imperfect feedback loop. Market participants can make bets for and against whatever strategy that pleases them and discover over time which approach will succeed. Losing a lot of money tends to focus the mind.
Better to look at the Growth Theory directly and couch it as such. Because the growth theory has successfully industrialized the world to date does not mean the theory has validity over time. Just because growth has worked in the past … results do not indicate future performance.