Bitter End

November 3, 2012 — campaign, corruption, current-events, government, politics, waste

bitterness tree

What are the factors that leave the bitter and putrid taste we have in our mouths from the election year?  Some feel the Supremes let all the dogs out when the allowed superpac money to influence us without disclosure.  I believe we know which interests support which candidates, so the secrecy is not the issue exactly.  What I notice this year is that wounds are the stars of the show.  The festering rust belt unemployment wound is pitted against the draught stricken farmer wound, or the immigration wound, with the neediest winning temporary, meaningless attention. Like siblings in a poverty stricken family who must srcap for  everything, childish whining leaders of the government constantly remind us of the undeserving nature of the other side of the aisle.  We know never to believe the statements they make or the reason they employ.  We know they are all in the pockets of the lobbyists.  Nobody has any faith that the  greedy, out of control people who spend our tax money have any principals that do not bend for funding. Our government is corrupt, which means that we pay for a lot of action that is destructive rather than productive.

The congress likes to tell the story that they make sausage.  They throw all the requests together in order to make laws that will pass both houses.  The lobbyist funding that influences every vote speaks much louder than the public interest. The public interest has no lobby, and therefore is not powerful enough to take a senator out to a fancy lunch or ball game to discuss the public’s point of view.  The federal government has not had time to do it’s job for years because it is campaigning all the time.  The need to feed the political machine to keep the candidate on the trail starts and ends with corporate and industry lobbies built for the purpose of  creating legislation favorable to partisan causes.  This is why the sausage is always full of disgusting unknown substances and crazy consequences.  Nobody is the wiser, since the bills generally are almost impossible to read or comprehend.  Nobody expects these laws to be enforced.  That is what seems to me to be the big bitter joke.

The most important factor that creates that bitterness is lack of enforcement.  The lawmakers put on some Kabuki theater of right and wrong through legislation wars.  In the meantime, we maintain gigantic agencies with so little oversight and supervision that nothing works.  All these laws on the books require offices full of civil servants, and buildings, vehicles, and infrastructure.  None of them seems to require enforcement.  The civil servants drive around in the civil vehicles ignoring fraud and corruption.  They are concerned primarily with the benefits of their jobs, the continuation of their jobs, and doing as little work as possible.  Enforcement is the least of their concern. Since the elected official who is in charge of the office is absent campaigning, waste is the word of the day.