We the People of the United States have become all but irrelevant in the policy discussions conducted by our elected leaders in Washington, D.C.
A recent study by scholars from Princeton and Northwestern universities found the average, everyday American has virtually no impact on either the thinking of the members of the U.S. Congress or their policy making decisions.
For better or worse, We the People have been reduced from empowered citizens of a representative democracy to the ignored, irrelevant and powerless subjects of a global superpower. A corporate empire determined to flex its economic and military muscle and impose its will on a world bristling at American hegemony.
As the psychopathic neoliberal/neoconservative warmongers currently in positions of power and influence inside the Beltway complete the transition from the Obama Administration to the Trump regime, the American global empire prepares for the next chapter in its drive for global rule.
Obama’s legacy?
First black president?
I think not.
It’s more likely to be his status as the president who guided The U.S. through a global economic disaster created by the willful misconduct of our financial elites, without jailing a single big bank executive. He is now the recipient of a $60 million book deal and numerous $400,000 speaking fees from the huge corporations he championed.
Bush’s legacy?
Defender of the Republic after 9/11?
I think not.
How ab
out the man who recapitalized the entire failed banking system with middle class tax dollars and then handed the bill for the global economic meltdown to working Americans? While embracing the Saudi royals who bankrolled the 9/11 attack.
As our nation seeks supreme and unquestioned power abroad, our people continue to suffer here at home. Our hollow Republic is fast becoming a Potemkin village, which appears outwardly strong and powerful, but is weak and crumbling internally.
Here at home, average, everyday Americans are left to watch as our domestic infrastructure crumbles and decays, our children’s public school education becomes second rate, our incomes stagnate or fall, and our quality of life declines. Instead of graduating into a world of opportunity after college, our young people are now locked into a cycle of tuition debt slavery thanks to our faltering labor market.
So many full-time jobs have been outsourced to China, Mexico, and India by our profit hungry corporations that there just isn’t much work left anymore which brings home the kind of money our kids need to pay off their college debts. What remains is mostly part-time, low wage work.
The education sector’s dirty little secret is that while for-profit colleges can declare bankruptcy to seek protection from creditors, the young people they bilk are on the hook for life. There is no bankruptcy protection for student debt.
Many of the same Americans who wept over the 2011 shooting of former U.S. Rep. Gabrielle Giffords (D – Ariz.) would be hard-pressed to shed a tear for members of the current U.S. Congress. It’s produced some of the lowest approval ratings in the history of the Gallup poll by embracing political corruption and abandoning the poor and faltering middle class.
Anger toward the self appointed political aristocracy in Washington, D.C., has become so heated that many Congress members have stopped holding town hall meetings in their home districts. President Donald Trump recently embarked on a lengthy overseas trip as his own approval rating plummeted to 39 percent.
The silver spoon billionaire’s 45 percent approval rating at the time of inauguration, on Jan. 20, was the lowest in U.S. history. The odds that he will be impeached this year are 3 to 1 on the Paddypower betting website.
Instead of voting with our billfolds and ballots as empowered citizens of a robust capitalist democracy, Americans are now voting in other ways against the rule of the predatory corporate trusts and monopolies who serve as the benefactors of our presidents and Congress members. Mostly by taking their own lives in record numbers.
Members of the faltering middle class are committing suicide in numbers not seen since The Great Depression and millions more are stalking the boarded up Main Streets of Flyover Country like zombies. High on heroin and other opoids.
E
very day, between 22 and 30 of our vaunted military veterans are taking their own lives. That horrendous death rate compares with a daily death toll of 0.8 during active combat operations in Iraq and Afghanistan.
It’s just a matter of time before they start taking predatory elites with them.
The current attempts in Congress to repeal Obamacare and the larger healthcare insurance reforms it brought about are just the latest indignity heaped upon an already beleaguered citizenry. One that makes it very clear that the interests of our healthcare and pharmaceutical trusts outweigh those of our neutered electorate, even though medical bills are the No. 1 cause of personal bankruptcy.
As long as America outside the Beltway obediently pays its taxes, sends its sons (and soon its daughters) to be IED fodder in our endless wars of empire, flys its flags, pins its yellow ribbons, and silently acquiesces in the atrocities being committed in their name overseas, we will continue to watch Stateside America atrophy and rot. The politicians and policy makers of the American Empire will continue to ignore the poor and flatering middle class in their mad drive for global dominance.
Until America renounces and abandons its overseas empire, closes its overseas military bases and brings the troops home, renegotiates its role in the NATO alliance or leaves NATO entirely, breaks the power of the military-industrial complex and the Deep State, cuts the War Department budget deeply and begins to address the many screaming, unmet problems here at home, Stateside America will continue to decline internally to Third World status.
Because the painful truth is that the current version of globalization, which is bereft of labor protections, is not meant to elevate workers in China, Mexico and India to our level. It’s meant to lower us to their level.
No progress can be made until the American
people rise up and retake control of their federal government from the current crop of elected politicians who ignore their constituents and take them for granted. Especially from the unelected shadow government that wields REAL power in Washington, DC.
The 535 members of our Congress have a median net worth of more than $1 million each. That compares with a median household income of about $52,000 for the rest of us.
How do these millionaires advance representative democracy?
They don’t.
Right now, you and I don’t count for squat in our own nation. The only way we can make ourselves relevant again is to communicate with the Predatory 1 Percent in a language they understand.
The painful truth is that our electoral system was built to facilitate peaceful revolution at the voting booth, because the Founding Fathers understood that absolute power corrupts absolutely. The two Wall Street parties have now dismantled that safeguard, to their everlasting peril, by leaving American voters with no choices except their preferred political hookers.
What’s the other alternative?
It’s not peaceful revolution at the voting booth.
We’re drifting closer to outright revolution with each passing day the predatory 1 Percent cavorts behind the walls of their gated communities, prep schools, country clubs and exclusive resorts. Deaf, dumb and willfully blind to the suffering all around them.
All it takes is a spark.
The tinder is there. Because our so-called “leaders” are no longer fit to lead.
They’re garbage and we deserve better.
