How to deal with corruption

Represent.us has a lot of energy and ideas. Here's the reaction to McCutcheon: It is time to move from defense to offense, and pass a wave of local anti-corruption laws across the nation over the next few years — while simultaneously organizing a 21st century anti-corruption movement made of grassroots conservatives, moderatesand progressives. The nation is ripe for such a movement, with voters abandoning the major parties in droves. A recent Pew study shows that a full half of millennials identify as political independents, up from 38% in 2004. It is the combination of passing bold reforms in cities and states, while creating a loud and visible, right-left anti-corruption movement that will provide the political power necessary to forcechange. We stand at a crossroads. Political corruption has grown so severe that reality is much closer to the dark TV drama “House of Cards” than what we learned about in grammar school. A recent New Yorker story about corruption in North Carolina describes state Senate Majority Leader John Unger: “Unger recalled the first time that a lobbyist for a chemical company asked him to vote on a bill. “I said, ‘I don’t sign on to anything until I read it.’ And he said, ‘Well, that’s not the way it works around here.’ I said, ‘Well, I don’t know how it works down here, but that’s the way I work.’ And he said, ‘Well, if you don’t learn to get along, when it comes to your reelection, we’ll stick a fork in you.” McCutcheon turned that lobbyist’s salad fork into a pitchfork. But with the right strategy, we the people can, and will, stick a fork in the beast that our system has become.

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What Karl Marx got right

To this point, Karl Marx offered a system of government that has not worked well anywhere that it has been tried, at least so far. I took a college course on Marx many years ago, and I was impressed with many of his criticisms of capitalism. Some of those criticisms of capitalism are becoming apparent to most of us, as set forth in this article by Sean McElwee of Rolling Stone. Here are the headings: 1. The Great Recession (Capitalism's Chaotic Nature) 2. The iPhone 5S (Imaginary Appetites) 3. The IMF (The Globalization of Capitalism) 4. Walmart (Monopoly) 5. Low Wages, Big Profits (The Reserve Army of Industrial Labor) McElwee's conclusion:

Marx was wrong about many things. Most of his writing focuses on a critique of capitalism rather than a proposal of what to replace it with – which left it open to misinterpretation by madmen like Stalin in the 20th century. But his work still shapes our world in a positive way as well. When he argued for a progressive income tax in the Communist Manifesto, no country had one. Now, there is scarcely a country without a progressive income tax, and it's one small way that the U.S. tries to fight income inequality.
Here's a related article by Jesse Myerson of Salon: "Why you’re wrong about communism: 7 huge misconceptions about it (and capitalism)." Here are the misconceptions: 1. Only communist economies rely on state violence. 2. Capitalist economies are based on free exchange. 3. Communism killed 110 million* people for resisting dispossession. 4. Capitalist governments don’t commit human rights atrocities. 5. 21st Century American communism would resemble 20th century Soviet and Chinese horrors. 6. Communism fosters uniformity. 7. Capitalism fosters individuality. Myerson's conclusion regarding misconception 7:
As a matter of fact, most of the greatest art under capitalism has always come from people who are oppressed and alienated (see: the blues, jazz, rock & roll, and hip-hop). Then, thanks to capitalism, it is homogenized, marketed, and milked for all its value by the “entrepreneurs” sitting at the top of the heap, stroking their satiated flanks in admiration of themselves for getting everyone beneath them to believe that we are free.

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Elizabeth Warren: Obama filling federal bench slots with corporate attorneys

Barack Obama is seeking only skin-deep diversity when he chooses judicial nominees. 70% of judicial nominees come from the corporate sector and only 3.6 percent of the president's nominees have a background in public interest organizations. Elizabeth Warren is concerned: "Power is becoming more and more concentrated on one side," she said. "Professional diversity is one way to insulate the courts from corporate capture."

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Chris Hedges discusses our undoing

Chris Hedges is difficult to read, but not because he is a bad writer. Rather, it is because he is not satisfied with official lies. Consider these observations of Hedges:

Our financial system—like our participatory democracy—is a mirage. The Federal Reserve purchases $85 billion in U.S. Treasury bonds—much of it worthless subprime mortgages—each month. It has been artificially propping up the government and Wall Street like this for five years. It has loaned trillions of dollars at virtually no interest to banks and firms that make money—because wages are kept low—by lending it to us at staggering interest rates that can climb to as high as 30 percent. ... Or our corporate oligarchs hoard the money or gamble with it in an overinflated stock market. Estimates put the looting by banks and investment firms of the U.S. Treasury at between $15 trillion and $20 trillion. But none of us know. The figures are not public. And the reason this systematic looting will continue until collapse is that our economy [would] go into a tailspin without this giddy infusion of free cash.
Who has the strength to see problems as immense and as obvious as these? Not many people, but their are some.
Yet we, like Ahab and his crew, rationalize our collective madness. All calls for prudence, for halting the march toward economic, political and environmental catastrophe, for sane limits on carbon emissions, are ignored or ridiculed. Even with the flashing red lights before us, the increased droughts, rapid melting of glaciers and Arctic ice, monster tornadoes, vast hurricanes, crop failures, floods, raging wildfires and soaring temperatures, we bow slavishly before hedonism and greed and the enticing illusion of limitless power, intelligence and prowess.

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