I don't usually quote long passages from other peoples' speeches and articles, but today I'm going to. In a recent Wall Street Journal article (Nov 18, 2011), Sarah Palin spelled out exactly what's wrong with our government, and I actually think she's spot on with this one. Allow me to begin by stating emphatically that I do not like Sarah Palin. I think she's a right-wing nut job. She's proven time and time again that she couldn't lead her own way out of a cardboard box. But every now and again, incompetent people come up with very astute observations and this is one of those times. I will quote her at length:
How do politicians who arrive in Washington, D.C. as men and women of modest means leave as millionaires? How do they miraculously accumulate wealth at a rate faster than the rest of us? How do politicians' stock portfolios outperform even the best hedge-fund managers? I answered the question in that speech: Politicians derive power from the authority of their office and their access to our tax dollars, and they use that power to enrich and shield themselves.
The money-making opportunities for politicians are myriad...accepting sweetheart gifts of IPO stock from companies seeking to influence legislation, practicing insider trading with nonpublic government information, earmarking projects that benefit personal real estate holdings, and even subtly extorting campaign donations through the threat of legislation unfavorable to an industry. The list goes on and on, and it's sickening.
Astonishingly, none of this is technically illegal, at least not for Congress. Members of Congress exempt themselves from the laws they apply to the rest of us. That includes laws that protect whistleblowers (nothing prevents members of Congress from retaliating against staffers who shine light on corruption) and Freedom of Information Act requests (it's easier to get classified documents from the CIA than from a congressional office).
The corruption isn't confined to one political party or just a few bad apples. It's an endemic problem encompassing leadership on both sides of the aisle. It's an entire system of public servants feathering their own nests.
This is something that I have been arguing about for years now. Our entire government system has been corrupted by the free flow of money to politicians. And no one in Washington is immune from that corruption. Even the most well-meaning reform-minded politician, arriving in Washington with the best intentions of changing the system, will be corrupted by it within their first term. George Carlin said it best during his last speaking tour.
The real owners are the big wealthy business interests that control things and make all the important decisions. Forget the politicians, they're an irrelevancy. The politicians are put there to give you the idea that you have freedom of choice. You don't. You have no choice.
You have owners. They own you. They own everything. They own all the important land. They own and control the corporations. They've long since bought and paid for the Senate, the Congress, the statehouses, the city halls. They've got the judges in their back pockets, and they own all the big media companies, so that they control just about all of the news and information you get to hear. They've got you by the balls.
They spend billions of dollars every year lobbying – lobbying to get what they want. Well, we know what they want; they want more for themselves and less for everybody else. But I'll tell you what they don't want. They don't want a population of citizens capable of critical thinking. They don't want well-informed, well-educated people capable of critical thinking. They're not interested in that! That doesn't help them. That's against their interests. They don't want people who are smart enough to sit around the kitchen table and figure out how badly they're getting [screwed] by a system that threw them overboard 30...years ago.
You know what they want? Obedient workers – Obedient workers. People who are just smart enough to run the machines and do the paperwork but just dumb enough to passively accept all these increasingly shittier jobs with the lower pay, the longer hours, reduced benefits, the end of overtime and the vanishing pension that disappears the minute you go to collect it. And, now, they're coming for your Social Security. They want your...retirement money. They want it back, so they can give it to their criminal friends on Wall Street. And you know something? They'll get it. They'll get it all, sooner or later, because they own this...place.
It's a big club, and you ain't in it. You and I are not in the big club. By the way, it's the same big club that used to beat you over the head with all day long and they tell you what to believe, all day long, beating you over the head in the media, what to believe, what to think and what to buy. The table is tilted, folks! The game is rigged! And nobody seems to notice, and nobody seems to care! Good honest, hard-working people! White collar, blue collar - doesn't matter what color shirt you have on! Good honest, hard-working people continue - these are people of modest means - continue to elect these rich [jerks] who don't [care] about them! They don't care about you! At all! At all! At all!
So there it is folks. Anyone who doesn't believe this is truly living with their head in the sand. Or, to use a contemporary term, you've drunk the kool-ade! I don't care who is running for office. I don't care what party they're from or what platform they're standing on. As soon as they get to Washington, they will become part of the system. They will be bought. And then they will spend the rest of their time in office telling you and me that we should be happy giving more money to support the very corporations that are intent on taking everything from us. Think I'm an extremist? Think I'm one of those conspiracy nuts? Not hardly. I'm just one of the vast majority of Americans who work our jobs day in and day out and go home and mow our lawns. It's just that I got a peek behind the curtain, and I saw the guy pulling the levers, and it ain't the great and powerful Oz. It's the folks running the corporations and the banks and the Wall Street brokerage houses and the media conglomerates - they are the ones in charge. And as Carlin said, they don't care about us at all.
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