from truthdig:
One Nation, Gone Awry Posted on Nov 2, 2011
By William Pfaff
The theme of most political and social commentary is that things are more complicated than you think. For once, I wish to write that things are simpler than you think. This concerns two matters at the core of the present American political crisis.
The first is that control over the government has passed all but completely into the hands of business corporations. The country has become a plutocracy. This has occurred because corporations are the principal supplier of funds essential to the election of federal officials—the president and the members of the United States Senate and House of Representatives, and through them, the members of the Supreme Court and the rest of the federal judiciary, all of whom are nominated and confirmed by the elected officials of the executive and legislative branches of the government.
As all, or nearly all, Americans understand, the nation’s constitutional system rests upon a theory of differences of opinion and interest among the citizenry finding expression in the election of presidents and legislatures that reflect public opinion in all of its diversity.
This diversity in the elected Congress and in the choice of successive presidents is expected to produce an overall system of balanced powers and interests, each of the government’s three branches contributing to checking the excesses of the others and of the government as a whole. This has reasonably successfully functioned except in the case of slavery, which caused an irreparable breach in opinion and the secession of the Southern states from the Union, and Civil War. ............(more)
The complete piece is at:
http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/one_nation_gone_awry_20111102/
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