Most American citizens believe that voters elect our state and federal legislators.  They would be wrong.  Elections are rigged by the massive amounts of money that fund them, and legislators are bought and sold in accordance with their campaign fund contributors.  This money does not come from you or me.  We could never hope to contribute enough to sway an election, we just don’t have enough to compete.  The money comes from corporations.  How do I know (besides from the minimal reports politicians must file)?  I know from the end result, from the laws that result.

Imagine yourself a working mother or father.  You work hard everyday.  You earn your paycheck, and like nearly everyone, it is spent when you get it.  If you are a poor family, maybe your optional luxuries include pizza out one night.  If your family is a little better off, maybe it means a real dinner out.  Then a little ‘hitch’ arises.  The electric bill comes in, and because it has been so hot, it is more than anticipated.  Or maybe the car needs new brakes.  Or maybe, heaven help you, someone gets really ill and you have bad or no health insurance.

So you borrow money.  You go to the payday lender down the street.  You know the kind, they are popping up all over the place.  Despite this kind of lending being legal (or thought up) only for the past couple of years, there are already more payday lending stores in this country than there are McDonald’s. You borrow a few hundred dollars from the payday loan store, and the interest rate is 365%.  That is not a typo, THREE HUNDRED SIXTY FIVE percent per year.

That’s right, we have laws that permit usurious interest rates of 200, 300, 400, and believe it or not, I’ve actually seen a loan with an interest rate of 969% interest.  I think the Sopranos only charged 50% and a broken limb as a late payment fee.

The lenders get away with this for several reasons; here are my two favorite:

1. the lender affiliates themselves with a national bank and/or
2. the lender has you sign a contract waiving virtually all your rights to hold the lender accountable.

The bank affiliation scheme is an interesting one.  (more…)

I’ve previously written that dollars are fungible (See “The Curse of Fungible Dollars”). In that article I pointed out that dollars are completely interchangeable.  I noted that there is actually only one kind of dollar and that dollars don’t come pre-labeled as “Christmas ornament dollars,” “pedicure dollars,” “Xbox dollars” or “charitable cause dollars.” I further suggested that we work hard to brainwash ourselves that non-fungible dollars exist and that we are free to spend any dollar we haven’t chosen to label a “charity dollar” on anything at all, conscience free.  To see the absurdity of that mindset, try to imagine a charity refusing your donation because the money you offered came out of your “vacation” fund.

Many Americans would consider my fungible dollars article to be a curse because it has the effect of moralizing every dollar we spend.  That every dollar is potentially a dollar we could (and possibly should) spend to help desperate human beings thus becomes a toxic thought that we prevent ourselves from considering.  It causes too much cognitive dissonance.  .  If you doubt the toxicity of such a thought, imagine speaking freely of the fungibility of dollars at a Las Vegas casino or at any other entertainment mecca where those “entertainment” dollars flow freely. The mere mention that all dollars are fungible will trigger the rapid and painful collapse of elaborate mental worlds constructed by everyone within hearing range. 

With the same dollars we spend to buy tickets to concerts or sports events, we could literally be saving lives. I often curse this thought too.  How could I not?  This idea invades every aspect of my life.  This thought has the capacity to obliterate all of my conscience-free spending zones.

As much as I have tried, though, I see no hole in my logic: whenever we spend a dollar on a luxury, we are choosing to not spend that dollar in a way that it is highly likely to relieve suffering or save lives.  We “solve” this problem by compartmentalizing our dollars as if they were not fungible, by erecting artificial mental fences.  In an ad hoc manner, we designate some of our dollars to be “entertainment dollars” or “vacation dollars.” We rationalize that we are allowed to hemorrhage substantial dollars on luxuries because we “deserve it.”

It gets worse, though. Just as dollars are fungible, so are hours.  Because we can use our limited time on earth to accomplish a wide variety of activities, the choice to spend an hour of time on something frivolous is necessarily and simultaneously a choice to not spend that hour on something that could be life-enhancing or even lifesaving to ourselves, to our community or to our world. 

About fifteen years ago, I finally realized just how ill-informed I was about many aspects of my world. For instance, I was (and am) poorly acquainted with much classic literature, including the works of Shakespeare.  I had (and continue to have) a shaky understanding of many scientific fields, including quantum physics and relativity.  Same problem with history, anthropology and many other fields. I concluded that I needed to become better acquainted with these fields in order to be a better writer and a better-informed citizen.  All I had to do was to make room in my schedule for such studies.  There are only 24 hours a day, however.  Therefore, I had to remove something from my schedule in order to make room.  I fretted about what to do as I sat on the couch watching a baseball game. (more…)

Bill Moyers thoughtfully analyzed this distinction in tompaine.com.   He describes the access our legislators give to special moneyed interests:

The total spent per month by special interests wining, dining, and seducing federal officials is now nearly $200 million. Per month.

Moyers writes that this huge legalized bribe is “a small investment on the return,” pointing to specific pieces of corrupt legislation passed by Congress in the past decade.  All of this has been given the combined stamp of approval of “big money” and the religious right:

Their religious strategy was to fuse ideology and theology into a worldview freed of the impurities of compromise, claim for America the status of God’s favored among nations (and therefore beyond political critique or challenge), and demonize their opponents as ungodly and immoral.

Moyers ends his piece with the following:

This is the heresy of our time – to wrestle with the gods who guard the boundaries of this great nation’s promise, and to confront the medicine men in the woods, twirling their bullroarers to keep us in fear and trembling. For the greatest heretic of all is Jesus of Nazareth, who drove the money changers from the temple in Jerusalem as we must now drive the money changers from the temples of democracy.

Where is the outcry by our congressional representatives?  I find their silence chilling and haunting. 

Silence is not what I’m hearing from real people on the streets.  They didn’t think Iran posed any imminent danger, not until Bush started provoking Iran with inflammatory rhetoric and talk of preemptive attacks.

My question tonight is why the silence?  The democrats sat on their collective asses while this same exact scenario played out regarding Iraq.  Where is the demand that the president quit provoking Iran and do some real diplomacy?  Why no collective demand for the president to be censured for his dozens of previous abuses of power?  Why aren’t our leaders telling him to put a cork in it and think of SOME OTHER approach? 

Do our representatives and senators really believe that Bush has any realistic plan for what to do after American missiles start blowing up empty Iranian trailers and scorching Iranian children.  Oh, I almost forgot; there IS a plan, and it’s full of lots of don’ts. The plan is DON’T COUNT THE CIVILIAN DEAD.  Those numbers would undermine American support for the war.  And don’t Count the dead adult civilians either.  Don’t count the homes we turn into rubble.  Don’t let the cameras look into the eyes of the terrified civilians or else we would see that they are human beings, just like us.  Don’t show the coffins of  the soldiers.  Don’t budget the war.  Don’t consider what life might be like without this war (better than with the war, perhaps?).  Don’t even think about any metric of success (that would just give the critics something to use).  Don’t state any particular purpose for the war; just call it the endless war on “terrorists.”  Who are “terrorists”?  They are bad people.  Very very very bad people who will do bad things to us for no reason.  They won’t sell us enough oil cheap.  They can’t be trusted with nukes, even though we are the ones, right now, threatening to use nuclear weapons.

By the way, let’s call this upcoming war “Operation SUV” or “Operation Urban Sprawl” for the astounding coincidence that this is yet another conflict with a country rich in oil.  Or let’s call it “Operation Slippery Slope,” because it opens the gates to dropping nuclear bombs on any country that might be developing them.  Actually, the calculus gets a bit fuzzy here:  the Chinese have nuclear bombs and they are sometimes belligerent.  They even call themselves “communists.” But they sell us VCR’s and all that plastic stuff we hand out at little kids’ birthday parties.  Today Iran is about nuclear weapons. Tomorrow, it might or might not be.  Perhaps this should give us pause whenever we substitute name-calling for measured diplomacy.

But back to that silence question. I question our feckless leadership, though I don’t question how we came to have feckless leaders.  

You each know some smart and trustworthy people, right?  Maybe YOU are smart and trustworthy too.  Then ask yourselves this:  would you or any of your smart companions ever consider running for Congress?  All you need is good ideas, right?  Not quite.

You also need lots and lots of money.  It cost almost four billion dollars to run the federal campaigns for 2004.  A senator must raise a million dollars per year to have a chance for reelection.  That’s more than $15,000 per week for six years.

Would you or your friends ever take on this financial burden in order to have a chance to use your great ideas?  Can you imagine holding out your hand and taking huge wads of money–in return for what?  Oh, yeah, “for nothing.” Strings attached?  “No no no no,” they say, but how else could you possibly make it rain that kind of money.  Most people that I trust and respect want no part of such a sleazy enterprise.

Let’s assume that you (and your acquaintances) are independently wealthy.  Money is therefore no problem. You’ll just fund your own campaigns.  No problem then, right?

No problem, unless you want the press digging deeply into every distant corner of your life.  You know where they’ll look? They’ll dig hard ($3.9 B worth of digging) to reconstruct that “experimental” phase you went through in college.  They’ll collect ALL of your passionate posts on the internet. They’ll find out about all of your struggles in high school and your relationship with your parents.  Oh yes, every little intimacy of your marriage will find daylight in every local newspaper.  And you’ll be subjecting your children to the bright lights and the loss of normalcy.  And don’t forget that the next “Swift Boat” crew is right around the corner waiting for you and your loved ones.  You be mocked endlessly by hypocrits that preach that only perfect people or bland people should be elected, when we all know that all people of decent character have regularly suffered though their own mistakes.

My Conclusion

With VERY few exceptions, honest, open-minded and fallible people we desperately need as our future leaders won’t run for Congress.  They wouldn’t run even if we begged them to run and quadrupled Congressional salaries.

Ergo: Almost all of the people now representing us in Congress were severely damaged before running or their moral compasses have now been wiped out by the ubiquitous DC corruption.  

I know that this poost sounds harsh, but you can double-check my conclusion by again noticing the deadly silence in Congress while the president of the US, a man with no game plan, with a lenghthy track record for shallow thinking and with a history of failing at everything he attempts, prepares to fire the first rounds of World War III.

This is truly insane.

Are the citizens really running our national government? That is the theory, that we the people call the shots. As imperfect as our system has always been, it has been getting far worse in recent years. Exhibit A: large oil companies getting huge tax breaks at a time when they are raking in exhorbitant profits. Amoral corporations are now pulling most of the big levers at the national level, while election day gives citizens the illusion that they are still in charge.

Unless we want to make a COMPLETE mockery of everything we teach our children in civics class, we need to adopt clean Money campaigns. One such campaign is underway in California: Link See also, Public Campaign’s site at Link .

Bill Moyers has passionately expressed why clean money campaigns are necessary.

A few years ago, my own state (Missouri) trounced a clean ballot issue that would have applied to statewide races (the proposed law is described at Link). The commercials aired by those opposing clean money elections stressed that we shouldn’t be “giving any money to politicians.” The cost would have been less than $10 per year per taxpayer.

That was too much for the voters, apparently. To put this all in perspective., the cost of the Iraq war, to date is approximately $3,000 per household. See Link .