Our Corrupt Government
Maybe it’s just because I live in New York, where our notoriously corrupt state government was recently AWOL for about a month, but this reader at TPM really nails how I’m feeling these days:
Just to mention something that is obvious, but hopefully not overlooked, i.e., if this country cannot pass a bill which insures that every citizen has access to medical care, which every developed country has managed to do (and got done many many years ago), there is something very fundamentally and structurally wrong with this country.
Such an event, in my mind, would confirm that we live with a completely corrupt and dysfunctional form of government. Forty nine states, each with bicameral legislative bodies, some of which have distinguished themselves recently with unabashed levels of incompetency and cluelessness. Then, graft a federal government over that, which is also bicameral, the non-representative portion of it being filled with officials who are certifiable morons and/or who are bought and sold like whores by wealthy contributors.
Talk about a Waterloo.
This is a defining moment in our history. Do we fulfill our supposed status as a “shining city on a hill” or continue our long slow decline into a second rate oligarchy?
I am not one prone to hyperbole.
I believe this to the depths of my soul.
Wow, thank you for sharing a powerful piece of writing.
I’m still wondering why our media are so flaccid on this subject. Last night the Lehrer program had a long “debate” on health care, which consisted simply of some of our more predictable elected representatives talking past each other with entirely predictable statements. Sen. Dodd did make the point that we spend far more on health care than any other industrial nation, and achieve the worst results in the industrial world — but neither he, nor anyone else, including Lehrer or Margaret Warner, every asked “why?” No one ever asked how much of our health care cost is administrative, and how far these costs, largely a function of private insurers, are related to the total medical care budget? And though there were one or two references to Gawande’s recent splendid piece in the New Yorker, pointing to places (like Mayo) that spend far less and achieve far more. no one ever mentioned the problem of fee-for-service billing, and the kind of incentive this means for higher but often fruitless spending.
No doubt there are those in the GOP and elsewhere who see the health care planning simply as a way to torpedo the administration. But then the administration and its friends have to address some of the real questions. One of them, surely, is why our private insurers, who have had decades to fix the problem, have so abjectly failed to come up with the kind of coverage which a) brings more people in, and b) saves both health and lives.
Perhaps, at least as a paper exercise, we should propose a single payer plan, then see how much it would cost thatn the present system (far less, probably), then ask ourselves what its shortcomings are, and how it could be fixed with the help of private insurers, giving us the sort of public-private mix other countries have.
Why would we develop a health care system that worked cheaply & efficiently for everyone, when on the other hand we could further enrich the wealthy?
After the one-man-one-vote ruling of the Warren Court there has been no justification for bicameral legislatures in the states unless perhaps that it pays some people to stay out of the work force.
Eduardo, unfortunately, I have to agree with you. I would only add that not only is our government corrupted but so are we, the citizens. As a group we have bought the package of individualism and consumerism that is promoted by so many of our institutions. Even with the recent encyclical “Caritas in Veritate” I fear that our Ameerican Catholic Churches will continue, in their day to day practices, to go along with this corrupt mentality rather than to challenge it.
My wife and I struggle to figure out how to offer an alternative, but we too are surely, if somewhat unwillingly, tainted. Unsurprisingly, we too need help to find a way to contribute to the conversion of heart that our situation calls for. We don’t find it in the kind of leadership currently exercised by the U. S. bishops.
In short, governmental corruption is just a highly visible facet of the pervasive situation in our country. Of course, we’re not the worst of peoples, but we have to overcome our habits of self-satisfaction with our supposedly “exceptional nation” status.
I’m afraid this part struck a chord with me: Then, graft a federal government over that, which is also bicameral, the non-representative portion of it being filled with officials who are certifiable morons and/or who are bought and sold like whores by wealthy contributors.
There’s been so much groaning and eye-rolling lately over the fact that Al Franken is now a senator (“Sen. Smalley,” as they’re calling him at Fox). As if Franken were the most embarrassing member of Congress! I would love it if that were true, but honestly, we should be so lucky. “Morons” might not be the word I’d choose, but “clowns” seems more than fair. Some of the best segments on The Daily Show come straight from C-Span — they don’t even have to write jokes. So I don’t know where people are getting the idea that Al Franken is somehow beneath the dignity of the Senate — when he describes the Internet as “a series of tubes” or starts posting ridiculous partisan talking points in text-speak on Twitter, let me know.
Is the import of this that our “corrupt” system should be overturned for some other model. Like what? European style paliamentarianism?
Our system is less corrupt than say – Greece or Spain or Italy?
The type of corruption the writer complains of is, unfortunately, part and parcel of a government that can, by policy, make people rich or ruin them. So, if we give them control of 1/6 of the economy (as if they don’t already have a lot of that control) they will suddenly do a better job? Or they will do a better job if there is a unicameral legislature?
Please, you are making the case for not trusting them with healthcare reform.
Already in February Mr. Penalver endorsed a quite similar view of American politics:
“Washington is the same one-party town it always has been — controlled not by Democrats or Republicans, but by Kleptocrats (i.e., thieves). Their ties to money make them the undead zombies in the slash-and-burn horror flick that is American politics”
http://www.commonwealmagazine.org/blog/?p=2781
In my view it’s attitudes like the ones embraced by our contributor (and unfortunately too widely shared on the extreme left and right) that make needed change so difficult.
It’s also worth remembering that, contrary to the spirit of the current post, the same constitutional hurdles that make passing major legislation so time-consuming and frustrating also make it maddeningly difficult to repeal misguided “reforms” once they are in place – which is not an argument for abandoning the constitution but a justification for proceeding with caution (perhaps even reading the legislation before it is passed).
The problem is not constitutional government, but how well our representatives are representing!
Today’s NPR Morning Edition had an excellent piece o how emantics are being used to promote the poltical needs of representatives in the discussion (e.g. Ronald Steele’s “experiment.”)
These semantics are shaped by big money which is what controls our politicians.
Meanwhile the least trusted profession as vieed by Americans are politcians.
So I open today’s paper, and the op-ed is Rich Lowry telling us that Obama is the “Ideolgue in A Hurry”.
There is profound hypocrisy, concern for power and little concern for the needs of the common good of people in the Washington scene.
I have read that a parliamentary style government would get larger changes through. However, if there were many tiny parties, like Italy, then perhaps it wouldn’t work much better.
On the other hand, the founding fathers seem to have intentionally created a form of government that wouldn’t be able to do much. There is wisdom in that.
My native state of Mass. has universal health care; perhaps the states are the place where this should be going on. (Mass has run into some problems of cost though.)
Thank you, Eduardo, for the inspirational words.
We’re in quite a fix when both the Left and the Right think that government as such is so corrupt and disordered that it can’t do anything positive.
The feeling of helplessness typically enters one’s affairs when some part of a situation is opaque. This is as true of our relationship with the government as it would be in our relationship with one other person. It is easy to understand part of a problem; and the part we understand is, in fact, real. In politics, the part that the Left sees is as real as the part the Right sees. It’s just that different people think that the part they are seeing is the whole thing and they don’t understand why the other side refuses to see the thing that’s squarely in front of their face.
Helplessness stimulates not solutions but reactions. Since reactions are not solutions, they always lack the characteristics of solutions. They are always over general rather than specific. They are always visceral rather than reasoned. They always foment discord rather than cooperation. And they always want to destroy and start over rather than fix or repair.
If I take a solutions point of view, if everything that Eduardo says is true, on can only approach the situation with optimism. Finding out that something is truly wrong is the first step towards finding a solution. And sometimes it takes a really spectacular failure to find out that something is wrong. It’s no accident that Alcoholics Anonymous thinks that a drunk hitting absolute rock bottom is a very good thing for the drunk. But the key here is to refuse to feel helpless, refuse to react, refuse to demonize one’s opponents, and refuse to offer as a solution something that says that our only possible alternative is to destroy complex things and start from scratch.
We need to keep our eyes on the prize, which to my way of thinking is ensuring that everyone (here legally or otherwise) has access to health care esp. affordable medications.
But my observation of the lawmaking process in this instance is that most of the focus is on the cost. Obviously that’s a very important consideration, but if the final product is something that is alledgely affordable but still denies health care to tens of millions of people, it will have been a failure.
It also seems to me that much of the mainstream media reporting is construing this as a horse race (will it pass or won’t it?), to the detriment of educating Americans on what the bill will look like and what it will mean for us.
Here is a guide from Sojourners that is being used by some churches. It lays out issues, questions, and some of the current fallacies or truisms that are canards.
Does not specifically provide solutions but is a helpful guide:
http://www.piconetwork.org/admin/documents/files/0029.pdf
Bill, thx, that is a helpful resource.
Failure to adopt a new health insurance model (not “medical care”) is a sign that our entire system of government is irredeemably corrupt? At least the author seems aware that this could be taken as hyperbole.
Studebaker, so far as I can see, only you have attached the adverb “irredeemably” to the adjective “corrupt” in this thread. Your hyperbole?
For my part, I live in the hope that our political society is reformable for the better. Redemption is not a notion that has much proper use in political matters. What Luther (or was it someone else?) said of the church is certainly always true of political practice. It’s always in need of some reform. What I mean, and what I presume that Eduardo means, is that our system is deeply flawed and distorted by the way money and deceit are used to perpetuate unfair and unnecessary poverty, bad health care, etc.
If it makes any difference, I’ll happily replace the word “irredeemably” with a direct quote from the post: “completely corrupt,” a term that is not different in terms of its level of hyperbole. Not to mention: “Waterloo,” and “defining moment in our history.”
Stuart/Studebaker: The “Waterloo” comparison came from the GOP. The poster says “Talk about a Waterloo” because that’s what people opposed to health-care reform (like Senator DeMint) have been doing.
I think Studebaker 0r Stuart’s post is an example of how corupted the political sysytem is by the partisanship operative in discussing the issue.
“I think Studebaker 0r Stuart’s post is an example of how corupted the political sysytem is by the partisanship operative in discussing the issue.”
Oh, please. The fact that other human beings disagree with you isn’t a sign of the “corupted” [sic] political system.
A sign of corruption is that elected officials are not allowed an adequate amount of time to read legislation before voting on it.
Mollie — then the Republican who said “Waterloo” was also hyperbolic. And the moral is? Both sides are often hyperbolic and immature.