Monday, January 5, 2009

2009: Corruption is so universal in our system that any major politician is vulnerable.

VHeadline's Washington DC-based commentarist Chris Herz writes: The fatuously hopeful here are already celebrating noon, January 20, when Barack Obama will be sworn as the 44th president of the USA. Hundreds of thousands will descend upon our national city for the festivities attendant upon what these suckers believe will be an change in the direction of their government.

Obama's Democratic Party, in stark contrast to its opponents offers no clear ideological principles; it is only a collection of pragmatic careerists and apparatchiks. A discordant group, seemingly with little interest in anything save their standing in the opinion polls.

The Republicans continue, even in the minority and with personnel changes in its leadership looming, to operate with impressive cohesion and discipline within the Congress and elsewhere. They have a clear objective, a basic ideology towards which they are always working. They believe in the need for state support for the rich and powerful, and blindly believe the rest of us can live upon the crumbs which drop from this table. Their firm base includes also, like all other fascists, the churches, nationalists, the military, the police and the other racists. In recent years they have been able to count on regular victories, and have even allowed themselves to yearn for a permanent majority.

The economic meltdown, coupled with the historic corruption and incompetence of the George W. Bush regime, all intersecting just before the election has cost this party for the moment its leadership of our country: Big money deserted the Repubs, enabling Obama to outspend them 5 to 1. But it was a close-run thing, as Wellington said at Waterloo.

Despite all the hoopla still we see the following figures: Of possible electors only 70% registered to vote, of these only 62% actually voted, just a point or two above the average turnout. I doubt even two or three percent actively participated in party work for one or another candidate or party. And still, 44% of the electors cast their ballots for the Republican John McCain. This in the face of an absolutely failed Republican administration and the onset of a world-shaking economic crisis, the worst since the Great Depression.

Thus a clear majority of US citizens join the majority of my own workmen, who nearly unanimously say that the politicians have naught to offer them, so why should they vote, or even more so, work for one of these parasites?
The small minority of working-class persons who do vote tend to cast their ballots for the fascists at the behest of priest or minister, or out of concern for their right to own firearms to hunt deer, which is a major source of protein for many ex-urban and rural families here within 100km of the national capital. It is difficult for foreigners to believe but this gun stuff is a major factor in our national politics.
Of course the church types cannot endure the tolerance of the Democrats for gay rights nor their embrace of women's rights nor their historic stand for Black civil rights in the past days of Johnson or Kennedy, nor their support in the days of Roosevelt for trades-unionism, even though this party has done the best it can to repudiate these past positions. In the USA the churches remain the most racially segregated institutions in our society.
And all that will be required to lure big money away from the Democratic Party will be the coming demonstration that the Obama regime, having already demonstrated its weakness and unwillingness to think outside the box of the conventional, is just as helpless in the face of the economic emergency as was that of Bush. The booming of a very attractive, if corrupt Jeb Bush, a loyal servant of the late unlamented Lehman Brothers and the other big banks, may prove useful in this regard.

This Bush, older brother of George is the former governor of our state of Florida. He is beloved of the gusanos there of both Cuban and Venezuelan origins. And he has a reputation for personal intelligence and competence, unlike his younger sibling. Another plus; he is attractive to the church crowd.

Were the Democrats equal to the task of governance they might easily indict and convict Jeb Bush for the use of his influence as a paid servant of Lehman Brothers to transfer hundreds of millions in state and local funds to this bank, just weeks before its collapse. This criminal deal was much more disastrous to that state and to the nation than was the routine peculation of the Democratic governor of Illinois, who merely attempted to auction off a political appointment, the vacated seat of the new President-elect. It is an accurate guage of real political power here that the latter became a media sensation and will be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law, but the former has already been resolutely ignored by corporate news media and prosecutor alike. The Republicans were likewise able to indict and incarcerate a Democratic Alabama governor and also another Illinois governor who even though Republican, had committed the politically unpardonable crime of liberating falsely convicted men from his state's death chambers.
  • Of course one can easily understand the reluctance of the Democrats to join in legal charades which could logically result in the imprisonment of any and all important national politicians: Corruption is so universal in our system that any major politician is vulnerable.
It is the clear impression here that ever in front of our leaders of both parties is the spectacle of the dissolution of the equally corrupt and bankrupt USSR -- where attempts to reform the system instead fatally de-stabilized it. Any attempts to change anything of substance -- the mass-corruption of government, the militarism, the health system, the drug war, the subversive power of the "intelligence community" and most of all the financial power of the oligarchy, must thus meet with adamantine resistance.

...and no one understands this better than Barack Obama.

From the imperial capital

Chris Herz
cdherz44@yahoo.com

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Venezuela is facing the most difficult period of its history with honest reporters crippled by sectarianism on top of rampant corruption within the administration and beyond, aided and abetted by criminal forces in the US and Spanish governments which cannot accept the sovereignty of the Venezuelan people to decide over their own future.

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