The historian Plutarch warned us long ago of what happens when there is no brake on the power of great wealth to subvert the electorate. “The abuse of buying and selling votes,” he wrote of Rome, “crept in and money began to play an important part in determining elections. Later on, this process of corruption spread in the law courts and to the army, and finally, when even the sword became enslaved by the power of gold, the republic was subjected to the rule of emperors.”
We don’t have emperors yet, but we do have the Roberts Court that consistently privileges the donor class.
We don’t have emperors yet, but we do have a Senate in which, as a study by the political scientist Larry Bartels reveals, “Senators appear to be considerably more responsive to the opinions of affluent constituents than to the opinions of middle-class constituents, while the opinions of constituents in the bottom third of the income distribution have no apparent statistical effect on their senators’ roll call votes.”
We don’t have emperors yet, but we have a House of Representatives controlled by the far right that is now nourished by streams of “dark money” unleashed thanks to the gift bestowed on the rich by the Supreme Court in the Citizens United case.
We don’t have emperors yet, but one of our two major parties is now dominated by radicals engaged in a crusade of voter suppression aimed at the elderly, the young, minorities and the poor; while the other party, once the champion of everyday working people, has been so enfeebled by its own collaboration with the donor class that it offers only token resistance to the forces that have demoralized everyday Americans.
Writing in the Guardian recently, the social critic George Monbiot commented,
“So I don’t blame people for giving up on politics… When a state-corporate nexus of power has bypassed democracy and made a mockery of the voting process, when an unreformed political system ensures that parties can be bought and sold, when politicians [of the main parties] stand and watch as public services are divvied up by a grubby cabal of privateers, what is left of this system that inspires us to participate?”
Why are record numbers of Americans on food stamps? Because record numbers of Americans are in poverty. Why are people falling through the cracks? Because there are cracks to fall through. It is simply astonishing that in this rich nation more than 21 million Americans are still in need of full-time work, many of them running out of jobless benefits, while our financial class pockets record profits, spends lavishly on campaigns to secure a political order that serves its own interests and demands that our political class push for further austerity. Meanwhile, roughly 46 million Americans live at or below the poverty line and, with the exception of Romania, no developed country has a higher percent of kids in poverty than we do.
Okay. All true and you can read the remainder, again, this link.
Having thus set the table, Moyers transitions to the "shredding of the social contract" theme, expressly.
Which, clearly and appropriately, leads this post to transition to John Boehner.
The same website hosting the Moyers op-ed also has a current item, "Tea party group lashes out at ‘tax and spend liberal’ John Boehner." Seriously.
You can read the item here, with this excerpt, (links are in the original).
The Tea Party Patriots group, one of the largest of the hundreds of right wing factions claiming the tea party mantle, lashed out at Rep. John Boehner (R-OH) this week.
According to The Hill blog, the groups are furious with the House Speaker for daring to speak out against the conservatives that are paralyzing Congress and portions of the entire U.S. government.
Earlier this week, Boehner brushed off a question from a reporter about conservative groups’ resistance to the tentative bipartisan budget bill that would prevent any further government shutdowns for at least two years.
“They are using our members and they are using the American people for their own goals,” Boehner said of tea party and other right wing pressure groups. “This is ridiculous. Listen, if you’re for more deficit reduction, you’re for this agreement.”
He also criticized the groups for appearing to be more interested in raising money than achieving any actual policy goals.
Never shy about expressing their outrage, tea partiers around the country have been sounding the alarm that Boehner is stabbing them in the back. The Hill reported on a particularly angry fund-raising letter from the Tea Party Patriots.
This has to be a joke. And a sick one at that.
Boehner is the face, heart, and soul of the social contract being shredded; and he delights in it and playing Tea Party victim at the same time.
Playing victim to attempt a sanitization of his rudeness and disquieting anti-Americanism, an anti-Americanism that moves and pivots in favor of big money over American people. If Boehner did not have the Tea Party for that sanitization attempt, he'd have to invent them. In all likelihood, that's precisely what he and his confederates did. It fits the mentality afoot in that club, and the surprise is anyone in mainstream media buys that posturing. But paying the piper sets the tune, and the tune is that Boehner is victim of his own rectitude in putting the national interest ahead of Tea Party considerations, which, of course is the BIG LIE that Boehner and his club keep repeating to try to gin up a publicly perceived belief of it being truth.
It is a cynical disdain for our citizenry, and the citizenry's ability to discern truthfulness from lying.
And it fails.
The lie is too big for even mainstream media to sell to us.
It's nothing but pure bullshit. As is that budget "deal" we are told to love. Think about it.
If John Boehner were choking on his own bile, mouth-to-mouth resuscitation should be reserved for one more worthwhile and deserving.
____________UPDATE____________
More of the same try-to-fool-us-more-than-once-and-again-and-again bullshit; here. The moneyed faction has to love Boehner. He is their mailman. He delivers.
Budgetorama: A musical comedy, Patty Murray/Paul Ryan, in concert. Way off tune. We are seeing a super shell game played out on the DC stage. Little but more of the same streetwalking, done in a different dress. And it galls. As it should.