When it comes to saying that government granted the corporations the power, that might be technically correct, but I would say that we need to be careful not to put cart before the horse. Money influenced things so it could bring in more money, and to make sure no threats would arise to it. Would that we could find many individuals with the traits you list! This goes back to the Framers’ arguments. Paine thought character was paramount in preserving a republic. Madison and Jefferson agreed that “if men were angels, no government would be necessary,” so they assumed men were selfish and then got busy devising a system to atomize power. Madison in particular looked at the capitalist market, and its system whereby compromise set the market price, and sought to infuse similar elements into our government—powers separated, checks and balances, etc. With our representatives having to compromise with each other, he thought, this would help keep power from being consolidated. Furthermore, he thought that so many special interests vying with each other in the political marketplace would mean that no one sector, or even a group, could seize power, and that would help keep tyranny at bay. These men cultivated wisdom, and they saw far, but they could not foresee the rise of these artificial entities called corporations. Nor could they foresee how these legal constructs would be treated as persons when it suited them, and yet as impersonal businesses when it did not, by the complete system—economic, legal, legislative, etc.
Government is often a half-weak vehicle today, a temporary station for those in the corporate power structure and all those who serve it. Their corruption is part and parcel of the generally corrupt big corporate power structure, and can seldom be separated from it. The elites tend to run in the same circles.
There is of course plenty of responsibility to go around for our sorry state of affairs. Corporate-power is the driving force, but it by far isn’t the only one. When it comes down to it, WE THE PEOPLE have been deficient. Like the famous passage from Éttiene de la Boétie, we have provided for, submitted to, ignored wrong, and been passive and active accomplices or dupes in the subjugation.
Yes, money corrupts our campaigns, but they are also contrived spectacles because we let them be. If campaigns were entirely of a different character, both in time period and scope, and perhaps even in funding (I am still undecided on whether money can truly be neutralized, or even if it should be), they would have less distaste and be more fulfilling, to paraphrase a famous beer commercial.
With your explanation, now I too am discontented over Obama’s omission of a few sentences to instruct on republic and democracy. This prof sends him a cold prickly on this part of the eval! :) As you say, it would have only taken a few sentences to explain.
Thank you for pointing out another facet of term limits. That IS one that is also listed as a proven drawback, and I was deficient for not mentioning it also. And while our politicians are not entirely disconnected from their localities “back home,” you are correct in that there is more manipulation and capitol-focus by them than our Framers intended.
To reiterate: Beck thinks term limits on representatives will give us “freedom from corruption, greed, arrogance, and, most of all, freedom from those who put their careers above country.” (P.56) Sorry Beck, the facts don’t support you. Studies have shown that, counter-intuitively, corruption actually INCREASES under term limits. When public servants know they can have no possibility of a career serving the public, they get very mercenary and self-centered, focused on the job (often with a lobbying organization or business they are “regulating”) they’ll have when their public “service” is over. In fact, term limits is another tool in the arsenal of those who would weaken government. And who might those be? Ah yes, the corporate masters again.
There is indeed too much isolation and insulation of our politicians in Washington. They, along with the rest of the elites and their allies, have largely (although not completely) decoupled from the rest of us. Instead of term limits, perhaps we could just make it progressively harder for re-election after a certain point (this would also help offset the incumbent’s advantage), say by imposing a 1% penalty per re-election attempt after a certain point, cumulative. So, say that after 12 years in office, each re-election attempt has one percent of the votes for that incumbent discarded (a second re-election attempt would have two percent discarded, etc.). Voters would really have to be in favor of the incumbent after a while.
A more critical problem, of course, is gerrymandering. Obama is right in every way about that one, and so was Schwarzenegger.
I welcome Beck for trying to shake us out of our apathy. But bringing something up and then immediately decrying government as the source or influence of that problem is leading, or rather misleading, and does a disservice. We the people don’t need any more disillusionment or disgust with our instrument, as every time it gets more gutted, more weaker, more bloated with irrelevance, we the people lose more of what little power we have left. I always look at who and what are trying to make government weaker, and why they are trying to do that. Those who want the government out of our private lives can be excused; those who want government “out of business’s business,” are suspect until demonstrated otherwise—as we have seen, just in the case of BP, Exxon, Wall Street, the mining industry, etc. de-regulation is a disempowering giveaway of power and influence, and breeds only dismissive contempt from the corporate elite. Yes, we need to be on guard for stifling regulation and bureaucracy, but its opposite number is just as, and perhaps more, of a danger.
So Beck would garner more agreement from me if he would be more shake-up and less knee-jerk against government itself, as that only plays into the hands of the corporate elite.
I guess I still have a different reading of Obama’s position on welfare.
“Reagan tended to exaggerate the degree to which the welfare state had grown over the previous twenty-five years. At its peak, the federal budget as a total share of the U.S. economy remained far below the comparable figures in Western Europe, even when you factored in the enormous U.S. defense budget. Still, the conservative revolution that Reagan helped usher in gained traction because Reagan’s central insight—that the liberal welfare state had grown complacent and overly bureaucratic, with Democratic policy makers more obsessed with slicing the economic pie than with growing the pie—contained a good deal of truth.” Obama 156-7
Obama is hard hitting about poverty and the inner-city. He says conservatives and Clinton were right about the way they transformed welfare, but he also points out that the job went no further, to the detriment of the newly working poor. Similar to Brown in his book Plan B, 4.0, Obama makes the case that poverty is a destructive and reverberating force throughout the greater society, and if we are to avoid its ills (let alone be fair to our fellow man), we need to address it in a holistic way. We Americans have this bad and self-damaging trait of throwing A solution at a problem without considering the long-term, without considering connections. And then when it blows up or blows back or merely just fails after expending time, talent, and treasure, we scratch our heads momentarily, promptly learn all the wrong lessons (if we learn any at all), and are on to repeating the same process in another avenue.
I saw no passage where Obama takes credit for welfare reform. He wasn’t in office then. But since Obama has a way of narcissistically inserting himself in the center of too many group efforts (it happens by page 2: “I had subsequently passed a slew of bills”), perhaps I just missed it. Welfare reform, which largely took place in 1995-1996, was a Republican Congress/Bill Clinton agreement (federal because that’s where the money flowed from to the states) that moved large numbers off welfare and into the work force, albeit the desperately poor workforce. Obama agrees that much of that needed to happen, as do I, and the debilitating effects of dependency and entitlement are just first in a long list of bad things. Yet because the corporate elites did not care, and indeed, were happy for another group of working people to exploit, bad consequences arose. This is one of the points, to my eyes, that Obama is trying to make.
Defense itself has become another entitlement program, a self-perpetuating fiscal beast. Because we have too long had a standing military, it has become the very thing Eisenhower (and the Framers) warned about. We now talk about “programs” to fund, bases to man, places to go, defense contracts to award, etc. etc. It has already become the largest expenditure in the federal budget. And yet who are our enemies? Largely only those we make, and certainly not symmetric ones. Yet we keep the structure in place to do everything, much of it by inertia, because that’s what we’ve had for the past 60 years. There is no strategic vision, and no holistic one that considers all aspects of security—including and particularly economic and ecological security. It has become a Defense machine, and one perpetually engineered for frequent or even constant intervention somewhere, “threats,” and even war. While much of it is a marvelously professional instrument, much of it too is bloated and utterly out of touch.
Social Security deserves its own future post, as it is complex. Suffice to say at this moment that it transformed in people’s minds and expectations, and by corporate abandonment of one, and perhaps two, of the three stools of retirement.
Education will be addressed more by me when we get around to focusing largely on Obama’s book alone, but I both agree and somewhat disagree with you.
Yes, Senator Obama appeared to be a fairly free-thinking and thoughtful guy, before becoming the Stepford Husband to the Corporate Controllers. :)
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