Voters Think Obama Is Trying To Take Their Social Security, Medicare and Retirement.

[woo me with science]

94. Here is my view, CTYankee,

Last edited Tue Apr 23, 2013, 06:53 PM - Edit history (1)

and I offer it with great respect and an embarrassed apology. You are among my favorite DUers, not the least because I have always wished that I'd studied more art in school, and your wonderful teaching interactions with everyone who responds to your art quizzes constantly inform and delight me. I look forward to them, a lot, even though I never have the answers. I apologize to you for my post about gradual awakenings. It was rude, particularly directed to another DUer, and I am grateful you responded directly to me the way you did. I really am sorry. I hope you can forgive me and try to hear my response to the post you just made.

To start: Corporate money and influence flood our entire political system now, from elections, where it takes billions in contributions and advertising to begin to complete at the national level, to the lobbying and deal-making that pervade Congress and the White House, to the restructuring in recent decades of countless aspects of our system to favor corporate interests (e.g., debate structure and exclusions, changes in funding laws...).

Given all of this, it deeply frustrates me that people keep trying to locate the problem in psychological explanations (i.e., in individual politicians who are mysteriously timid or have some idiosyncratic need to "impress" someone), when the systemic, pervasive corporate-financial web of pressure and influence is so clear and documented and in our faces.

In my strongly held view, the reason the betrayals keep happening is not a mystery. It is not a mystery at all. It is not a matter of personality quirks or psychological peccadillos or evil intentions or personal weaknesses of individual candidates. It happens over and over and over again, because the system creates it and demands it. It is virtually impossible anymore for a politician to make it to the level of Presidential election unless they are massively beholden to major corporate donors, and the same is true to a large extent for Congressional races. And the corporate-financial pressures and incentives once in office are just as great. And even those few who might have a fleeting chance to buck the financial pressures, say, as a result of being independently wealthy to begin with, will be targeted mercilessly with the deep pockets of the gargantuan corporate media to remove them from the races even before they begin.

I just feel like we need to cry this from the rafters. If you look at how the whole system is structured, it's not a mystery at all. It's really, really, really not.

The media doesn't talk about financial corruption of the system, which is why so many people remain mystified. But IMO we need to look squarely at this elephant in the room, and realize that it's really *good* news that it's not such a mystery, because structural problems, once identified and confronted with unified public outrage, can be fixed.