Bailout For Bush

Updated: Monday, 1:15pm

I have not read the agreed-upon bailout bill, and would not understand it if I did. I have read three summaries written by people who do understand the bill. One of them thought it should be approved while two of them thought it should be burned, the ashes plowed into the ground and the earth salted. I'm with the latter two, and I have repeated my earlier messages to my Representative and both Senators to that effect.

Forget the "phase in" of the amount; Paulson will get all $700 Billion. Forget the "oversight;" it is a farce, since it is after the fact and can be easily circumvented. Forget the ban on "golden parachutes" and such; the ban applies only to any new executive hires and the existing executives can be paid any amount the companies desire. Forget protecting homeowners; that was removed from the bill. What started as a three-page bill wound up as a 110-page bill, 107 pages of which are pure window dressing. It is still the original three-page bill.

There is no meltdown or disaster coming, there is a recession coming and this bill will delay that recession until the next administration. When it occurs it will do so with the national debt needlessly $1 Trillion higher. This bill has two purposes. The first is to engage in one last orgy of enrichment of the Bush coterie. The second is to change the Bush Recession to the next administration's recession. Bush doesn't care whose name is on the coming recession, so long as it isn't his.

Update: Monday, 1:15pm
I'm not saying that nothing needs to be done. I'm sure that something does. I'm suggesting that this does not smell like the right plan; that many economists have suggested that it is not the right plan and their words should be considered. They have not been listened to.

Note that the only financially knowledgeable persons engaged in the marathon sessions leading to the bill were Bush Administration officials Paulson, Bernanke and Cox. No other plan was ever considered, no other financial opinions sought, no other method of rescue put on the table. The Paulson plan was admitted to be unacceptable, but no option other than modifying it around the edges was ever considered.

Congress At Work

Since food prices have risen so high and farmers’ income is at its highest level ever, Congress is working feverishly on passage of the Farm Bill. Yes, that’s the bill that will provide billions in federal money to farmers, whose products are selling at all-time high prices, and whose profits are the highest they’ve been in many decades.

Home builders, construction workers, and retailers of products related to the building industry are at the lowest they’ve been in memory and are going bankrupt in droves, but Congress has not even conceived a bill to assist any of these groups at this point.

According to McClatchey News yesterday,

The specialty crop funding includes $499 million for a block grant program. The money will be distributed among all 50 states for help with marketing, promotion and food safety, among other efforts. In a separate research chapter, negotiators included $230 million for specialty crop research.

Why do our tax dollars fund “marketing and promotion” of any product at all? Let alone the product of an industry that is currently operating at record profit levels?

Congress is contributing long hours and great effort to this bill,

Congressional negotiators anticipated working into the night Thursday, though final approvals won't come until budget numbers are firmed up next week.

A bill which “will easily exceed 1,000 pages when all is said and done.”

No apparent progress on a housing relief bill, or on any kind of sensible energy policy bill, or on a bill to end a multi-dimensionally costly war which is not accomplishing its stated purpose (a purpose which changes frequently), nor on any kind of bill to reasonably re-regulate our financial sector, or on a bill to restore privacy to communication

No effort to even start a bill to end torture, or to restore the integrity of habeas corpus, or to prevent detention without charge or representation, or a bill to restore integrity to the Department of Justice.

None of those bills is important. The Farm Bill, which gives away money to people (currently wealthy people) who a) vote and b) provide campaign contributions is important.

That’s the Democratic Congress, which we elected to solve all of the problems that were being caused by having the Republicans in control. Remember that the next time you think that the problems this country faces will be solved simply by electing a Democrat, any Democrat, to the office of President.

Democratic Myth

After watching as much of the Petreaus/Crocker hearings as I could tolerate yesterday, I am less sold than ever on the prevailing myth that electing Democrats to office, and in particular electing a Democrat as President, is going to solve the problems of government that our nation faces today. It was difficult to detect who was triangulating more feverishly; Petreaus and Crocker, the Republican politicians, or the Democrats. Clearly, no one in that room was interested in anything other than self-aggrandizement. Well, Petreaus and Crocker were probably interested in leaving, but…

Consider that literally hundreds of incidents of graft, corruption, misfeasance, malfeasance and law-breaking have been discovered in the Bush Administration during the fifteen months that this Democratic Congress has been in session. Some of it has been uncovered by Congressional investigations, but not one single action of justice has been initiated by this Congress. Not one single subpoena or indictment has been issued. Not one single person has been fired or impeached. Upon discovering wrong doing, this Congress has complained and wrung its hands and has done nothing.

This is the Democratic Party, which we are hoping will save our government.

Consider that, even before it was elected into the majority, the leadership of this Congress declared that Article 2, Section 4 of the Constitution of The United States of America was to be null and void; that their wisdom was greater than that of the founders of this country, and that the President of this nation should not be subject to and limited by threat of impeachment.

This is the Democratic Party, which we are hoping will save our government.

Consider the campaign staff of Hillary Clinton. I offer this not as an indictment of this candidate, although it certainly is just that, but because she is the candidate who has the support of the Democratic Party. While Obama outnumbers her in pledged delegates elected by voters, she has more pledged delegates who are those known as “superdelegates.” The latter are not elected by voters, but are granted that status by virtue of their standing in the Democratic Party apparatus.

Clinton’s campaign chief was Mark Penn, who also worked as a corporate lobbyist with clients including Microsoft, oil companies and, of course, Columbia. Clinton was very well aware of this and did not require him to sever his ties with corporate lobbying in order to manage her campaign; a rather serious conflict of interest. That came to a head last week when he was paid handsomely to lobby in favor of a Colombian trade pact which she was campaigning against. Even then, while she made a show of “firing” him as campaign manager, she did not remove him from her staff, and he continues to participate both in his corporate lobbying enterprise and as part of her campaign staff.

And after that happened, she did not lose the support of one single superdelegate. I don’t really care who Hillary Clinton has on her campaign staff, but the fact that the Democratic Party is supportive of her permitting a paid corporate lobbyist to be part of her staff suggests to me that, as Shakespeare might put it, “there is something rotten in the state of Denmark.” Or, in this case, New York.

Karl Rove not only quit his job as a lobbyist to work for George Bush, he sold his interest in the lobbying firm. Mark Penn, with Clinton’s approval, kept his ownership in the lobbying firm and continued to actively work as a lobbyist while managing her campaign, and continues to do so to this day. The Democratic Party has no visible objection to this practice, and her superdelegates remain pledged to her.

Our government is owned by corporations, and their lobbyists actually participate in writing the laws of this nation. That has been happening for many years, but legislators used to have the decency to at least to try to keep it under the table. The Democratic Party is now becoming so openly controlled by corporations that they are acknowledging that it is permissible to have corporate lobbyists as members of a legislative staff.

This is the Democratic Party, which we are hoping will save our government.

Electing Democrats, per se, solves precisely nothing.

The Favor File

If you haven’t discovered BookTV you should look for it on your cable lineup, or check out their website, BookTV, to see if they air in your area. They have speakers, interviews… Good stuff.

There is a catch, in that a surprising number of really good authors are really bad speakers. Some are so bad that I have to switch channels. There are many more good ones, though, and I have become a fan.

Last weekend I watched a bookstore speech by Vincent Bzdek on his book Woman of the House: The Rise of Nancy Pelosi. That is, I watched as much as I could stand, as he is one of those really bad speakers. I have serious doubts about his quality as an author, too, as he read excerpts from his book and they were well short of dazzling.

There was some content which he described that I thought reflected on the state of politics in our nation, and did not reflect creditably on what our political system has turned into.

I am certainly a liberal, or at least a progressive, and I champion the case for the rise of women to positions of authority and power in business and in government. But I am not a Democrat, and I have never been a big fan of Nancy Pelosi. Certainly very little she has done as Speaker of the House has seemed noteworthy to me, other than her statement, “The president is wrong, and he knows it.” There was a charming twinkle in her eye when she said that, and I admire any politician who has the courage to call this president a liar.

Bzdek went into raptures over the fact that Pelosi raised five children. He seemed tremendously impressed by this issue as did, apparently, Pelosi herself. He quotes her as saying that raising five children is perfect qualification for being Speaker of the House. He spoke at quite some length on this issue.

He didn’t say, but apparently he himself has no children.

I found myself wondering wtf? Women have been raising children for hundreds of centuries, and they’ve done it in settings much more harsh than a San Francisco mansion and without the support of a multi-millionaire husband. There seemed to be a certain, shall we say, lack of proportion about this part of the discussion.

As an aside, I had a neighbor who raised eight children. The kids were great; they were well fed, well clothed, and doing well in school. The mother was an idiot who couldn’t keep gas in her car and occasionally sent the kids to school on Saturday by mistake. By Pelosi’s rule, we probably should elect her president.

Bzdek was quite eager to describe how Pelosi got into politics. She had not been political while performing the Herculean task of raising children, but the last one was in high school and that superb feat was now all but complete. The sitting Representative of the House was dying, and she picked Pelosi to succeed her in that House seat, as “she wanted Nancy to succeed her and she knew that Nancy could not refuse.” So she called Pelosi to her deathbed and told her to take over the position, and of course Pelosi agreed. And that’s how Pelosi became a member of the U.S. House of Representatives.

Did you notice something missing from that narrative? Ah, an election.

Nancy Pelosi did have to stand for election to the House, but districts in California, as in any state, are so gerrymandered that elections are a mere formality. The party for whom that district has been drawn up selects whom they want in the position, they pour money into that person’s campaign, and that person is in that office. Voting machines make that even easier, as the political machine can make the voting machine show pretty much any vote totals it wants.

Often, as in the Pelosi story, the person holds the office for life and then, on their death bed, chooses their successor.

We no longer even do this in secret. It’s right out in the open. We write books about it and consider it quite wonderful and admirable. We cite it to bring attention to how terrific the appointee is, that the dying politician wanted her to succeed to the office.

The other thing that hugely impressed Bzdek was what he called the “favor file” and Pelosi’s ability to work it. He described how when her father was in politics she spent twelve hours daily writing down a list of everyone they did favors for and then calling them back later for return favors. He said that she had carried this ability forward and that no one in the House was better at “working the favor file” than Nancy Pelosi.

So we have, as Speaker of the House, not the person who has shown the greatest qualities of leadership, not the best person at building consensus, not the person of the highest moral standards, but the person who is most adept at “working the system” of cronyism and corruption.

And, to repeat, we no longer even do this in secret. It’s right out in the open. We write books about it and consider it quite wonderful and admirable.

Government conducted by “working the favor file.”

The Governing Class

Just four days ago in this blog I wrote the following,

"Our country is now governed by an elite and wealthy class that is completely removed from the general population; with income, health care and retirement benefits beyond the fondest dreams of those it governs."

Today Glenn Greenwald, in a lengthy but absolutely must read post, describes our senior senator from California, Dianne Feinstein, and makes my point precisely. You will have to "click through" an advertisement to get to the post, but it is well worth reading.

A few excerpts to whet your appetite.

Feinstein represents a deep blue state and was just easily re-elected to her third term last year. She won't run for re-election, if she ever does, until 2012, when she will be 80 years old. Her state easily re-elected a Senator, Barbara Boxer, with a much more liberal voting record than Feinstein's. Political fear cannot possibly explain her loyal support for the Bush agenda on the most critical issues decided by the Senate.

Additionally, Feinstein is a 74-year-old divorced Jewish woman currently on her third husband, and it is thus extremely unlikely that she harbors any hopes of running in the future on a national ticket. She has as secure a political position as any politician in the country. Whatever explains what she does, it has nothing to do with "spinelessness" or fear. What would she possibly fear?

And yet, her votes over the last several years, and especially this year after she was safely re-elected, are infinitely closer to the Bush White House and her right-wing Senate colleagues than they are to the base of her party or to the constituents she allegedly represents.

(snip)

Hence, Dianne Feinstein funds Bush's war with no limits while condemning MoveOn. She votes to vest vast new surveillance powers in the President. She defends and vouches for and places blind faith in the whole litany of Bush intelligence officials who have spent the last six years radicalizing this country and breaking the law.

Plainly, Feinstein does not do this out of political fear or "spinelessness," but because it is who she now is and what she believes. She and those like her are the reason why there is such a gaping disconnect between the Beltway political class and the political views of most Americans. ... And in Feinstein's case, it is particularly easy to understand why this is so. Her current husband, Richard Blum, is an extremely rich defense contractor whose companies have endless relationships with the work Feinstein does in the Senate. It is entirely unsurprising that Feinstein's affection is reserved for officials in the intelligence and defense communities because those are her social peers, the individuals with whom her husband interacts professionally and socially and with whom she most identifies.

More than anything else, Feinstein worships at the altar of the Beltway power system and its most revered members. Conversely, she has contempt for the liberal base which elects her and the constituents she represents. She long ago ceased being driven by the political values which serve as props for her campaigns, if she was ever driven by them. And that is the story of so many of the Beltway Democrats.

Greenwald's post provides the details of her activity in the Senate, and reveals specifically just how disconnected she is from the "lower class" which she and her ilk rules. Go read it, and then try and figure out how in the hell you can vote.

The Iron Law of Institutions

The tragedy in New York happened six years ago today. It is appropriate to remember that day, and to grieve for those who lost their lives, and those who lost loved ones and friends in that awful event. I can still remember standing in front of the television with my wife, I was too filled with horror and sadness to sit, and that memory still evokes feelings six years later that I would prefer to have go away.

It is also appropriate to ask why we, as a nation, have still not recovered from this wound. This was not a killing blow, and yet six years later its effects still pose a threat to the very fabric of our nation, for we have scratched the wound endlessly and raised it to an inflammation that is nearly breaking us.

Colin Powell raised this point in an interview with GQ. He uses a phrase that I would prefer to avoid on this date, but these are his words.

"What is the greatest threat facing us now?” he said. “People will say it's terrorism. But are there any terrorists in the world who can change the American way of life or our political system? No. Can they knock down a building? Yes. Can they kill somebody? Yes. But can they change us? No. Only we can change ourselves. So what is the great threat we are facing?"

When I was growing up the threat we faced was hundreds of nuclear missiles pointed at our cities and the possibility that we would lose, not two buildings and 3000 people, but 50 or 60 cities and tens of millions of people in a single act of war. Such an attack would result in this country ceasing to be as a functioning entity. The threat was an existential one since if it happened we, as a nation, would no longer exist.

President Bush refers to “Radical Islam” as an existential threat and in so doing he lies for even his fevered, fearful little mind knows that they are nothing of the sort.

As Colin Powell points out terrorists can take some lives, they can destroy some buildings, they can wound us, but they cannot inflict a wound of the severity that will bring us to the point of extinction. Take even the “worst case” that our radical political panderers posit, the stolen nuclear devices that destroy two of our cities, as absurd as that eventuality may be. Does that cause us, as a nation, as a way of life, to cease to exist? It doesn’t even approach that level of harm.

The existential threat that we face is the Iron Law of Institutions.

The people who control institutions care first and foremost about their power within the institution rather than the power of the institution itself. Thus, they would rather the institution "fail" while they remain in power within the institution than for the institution to "succeed" if that requires them to lose power within the institution.

Instead of leadership after the events of September 11, 2001 the politicians of both parties have been using that date to enhance their own position of power within government; six long years of demagougery and self interest instead of proper government.

In so doing they have weakened the country as a whole by driving it into a position of fearfulness that supports an endless war based on false premises. A war that increases terrorism worldwide. A war that weakens the country’s political alliances. A war that destroys the country’s economy. They preach terrorism and foment a war that doesn’t fight terrorists in order to preserve their position of power within the government.

Democrats promise that all of this will change when the people throw the Republicans out and put them in power. The people do just that and almost one full year later nothing, absolutely nothing has changed.

It’s the Iron Law of Institutions still at work. Democrats do not want the war to end, not just yet. They want it to keep going long enough that they will have it to use as a campaign issue in the 2008 elections.

The current chief executive led the way on a horrendous erosion of our constitution, on the reduction of guarantees of civil liberties, and the Democratic majority that we installed almost a year ago has uttered not one single word about restoring one iota of that loss. Of all the corruption and theft that has been uncovered, not one single person has been prosecuted or impeached. Not one presidential candidate has even hinted that they would go about restoring the constitutional balance of power in our government if elected.

The existential threat that we face is our own government.

But we will reelect those in office, and elect others, based on lies and we will elect one of these presidential candidates who has done nothing but mouth platitudes. We will believe the empty promises of the Democrats who say they will “drain the swamp” but will only wallow in it up to their necks, and we will be shocked and appalled when the talking head we elect as president declares war on some distant country and embroils us in another war to in order to “spread democracy” in our name.

Because the Iron Law of Institutions is called that for a reason. It has its grip on government, and I fear it has become too late to break its hold.

Far more terrible than any terrorists, our own government.

Governing Pakistan

Much is being made of the upheaval of government in Pakistan, of the possible removal of military rule and the return of Benazir Bhutto and democratic government. William Dalrymple casts some light on just what Bhutto’s return might actually mean in A friend of feudalism at
comment is free… in the Guardian today.

…it is often forgotten the degree to which Bhutto is the person who has done more than anything to bring Pakistan's strange variety of democracy - really a form of elective feudalism - into disrepute. During her first 20-month long premiership, astonishingly, she failed to pass a single piece of major legislation. Her reign was marked by massive human rights abuse: Amnesty International accused her government of having one of the world's worst records of custodial deaths, extrajudicial killings and torture. Bhutto's premiership was also distinguished by epic levels of corruption. In 1995 Transparency International named Pakistan one of the three most corrupt countries in the world. Bhutto and her husband, Asif Zardari - widely known as "Mr 10%" - faced allegations of plundering the country.

...Nor is the distinction between democracy and military rule quite as sharp as Bhutto likes to imply. Behind Pakistan's swings between military government and democracy lies a surprising continuity of interests: to some extent, the industrial, military, landowning, and bureaucratic elites are all interrelated and look after one another.

Emphasis added by me to illustrate how much that sounds like the Bush Administration, actually our entire government.

Moneyed interests, the military, and political careerists have changed our government from a representative republic to precisely what is described as being run by Benazir Bhutto in Pakistan.

We now, not in the future but now, live under elective feudalism.

Politics or Leadership

I’m going to do more quoting than usual in today’s post again today, and again it’s because my reference, Cenk Uygur in A Test of Leadership on The Huffington Post today says it better than I would have put it. Go there and read his entire post.

That being said, it is no excuse for the candidates to cower behind the system and say they couldn't lead because the media wouldn't let them. Not exactly a profile in courage. [snip]

Leadership is not casting a vote in the middle of the night and then running away. Leadership is not waiting to the last moment to see how the other candidates vote. Leadership is not polling to see how issues are going to play in the primaries and the general election.

That ”casting a vote in the middle of the night” refers, of course, to the last Iraq war funding bill where both Obama and Clinton waited until the bill has received enough votes to pass and it was late at night when no one was likely to be watching on Cspan before quietly casting votes against the bill. They were against the bill but made no actual effort to prevent its passage.

So will the vaunted leader and front-runner Senator Hillary Clinton be able to lead the fight against Bush's war stance in September? Will she even try? Does she even know what it means to lead others? Has she ever tried?

Screeching invective at the current executive is not leadership, it’s politics.

Making promises about what you will do if elected is not leadership, that too is politics. Especially since most of what you are promising is not within the power of the office you are seeking, and even that portion which could be done you almost certainly allow to be blocked by the moneyed interests who have funded your campaign.

The one place that Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama have been in a position to demonstrate leadership is a seat in the U.S. Senate, and how have they used that opportunity? John McCain led a fight against the torture bill, albeit an abortive one. Ungyar mentions Senator Feingold, who is indeed a leader in the Senate, leading a fight against the Patriot Act and the FISA Bill. When has Clinton or Obama stood up in the Senate and actually tried to influence any action the Senate was about to take?

Leadership is not blaming or seeking power. Leadership is taking a position in which you believe and acting in a manner to influence others to join you in that position. Acting. Leading not just with words but with actions. To be a leader it is not sufficient to talk about principles and beliefs, one must be those principles and beliefs.

Stratification

Stratification is, basically, the gap between the “haves” and the “have nots” in our society. Not just the rich and the poor, but the gap between those who have more wealth than they can waste, let alone use, and those who can not even put a well rounded diet on the table for their families on a daily basis without borrowing against the equity in their house, false money which puts them at risk of losing their home merely to feed their children.

This is a problem that America faces today which is far worse than the war in Iraq, or the threat of a terrorist attack, or whether or not Iran is developing a bomb, and it’s even bigger than the healthcare crisis, free trade or taxes. The latter three issues are part of stratification.

The sociologist Doug Masseyhas published a new book Categorically Unequal: The American Stratification System (Russell Sage, 2007), and Eric Alterman quoted an excerpt from it in Altercation today. I’m going to excerpt from his excerpt. I don’t usually do this much quoting in my blog posts, but this is really powerful stuff.

Since the mid-1970s, the United States has become a vastly more stratified society. Among the world's developed nations, it has by far the highest inequalities of income and wealth. The rise in inequality has been attributed to a variety of factors, including globalization, technological change, and market segmentation. Nonetheless, all countries compete in the same global economy and face the same technological and market conditions, yet the United States is unique among advanced nations in the degree to which it allows these large, macro-level forces to generate inequality.

[snip]

The decision by the Democratic Party to embrace civil rights in the 1960s promoted a mass exodus of Southerners from the party and the estrangement of blue collar voters in the North, putting an end to the New Deal coalition.

On the heels of this realignment, the rules of the American political economy were rewritten to favor the rich at the expense of the middle and lower classes. Unions were weakened, entry level wages reduced, access to social protections curtailed, anti-poverty spending cut back, and taxes on lower income families were raised while those on upper income families were reduced, yielding a sharp reduction in the size of the welfare state and a significant decline in the social well-being of most Americans. As millions of Americans resorted to borrowing in a vain attempt to maintain living standards, the real interest on credit card debt was increased and bankruptcy laws tightened.

The new choreography of rising income inequality and increasing political polarization was reinforced by the emergence of a new geography of inequality characterized by greater class segregation and the spatial concentration of both affluence and poverty. Increasingly the poor have come to live apart from the affluent in communities and neighborhoods inhabited primarily by other poor people, while affluent families have come to separate themselves from the poor within communities and neighborhoods inhabited by other affluent people.

That there is nothing inevitable about the high level of inequality prevailing in the United States is suggested by a cross-national comparison of income inequality before and after taxes. Before taxes, U.S. income inequality is by no means exceptional compared with other developed nations. Indeed, it is roughly the same as in Sweden and Germany and considerably less than in Belgium and France.

Taxation works to redistribute income in all countries, but the extent of the redistribution is much less in the United States. After taxes and transfers, income inequality in Belgium, France, Germany, and Sweden drops to low levels. It drops in the United States too -- just not nearly as much. It is only after taxes that America emerges as the most unequal of all developed nations, with a level of income inequality that is 50% greater than in Belgium and 33% greater than in France. Thus inequality in the United States is not an axiomatic result of globalization or technological change. It is a result of specific political choices that we, as a society, have made.

Emphasis was added by me.

I would point out only that “we, as a society,” have not made these choices and, I firmly believe, would not do so. Our government, as a result of the corrupting influence of moneyed interests in our political system, has made these choices for us.

Risking the Dynasty

Kevin Drum, always interesting reading, posted Friday about the kind of thinking that led to Congress giving the Bush Administration increased surveillance powers in the FISA update.

Note the way the incentives work here. If you pass the bill, the results are ambiguous. Sure, a lot of people will be angry, but they'll probably get over it eventually (or so the thinking goes). But if you stall the bill and a terrorist strikes, you are firmly and completely screwed. Goodbye political career. So which choice do you think a risk-averse politicians is likely to make?

He doesn’t engage in a lot of discussion regarding what he thinks about this rationale, other than,

Nobody wants to risk being proved wrong in a way that's so crystal clear there's simply no chance of talking your way out of it. It's this fear that gives national security hawks the upper hand in any terror-related debate. Still.

I know I posted about this just a few days ago, but the constitutional crisis we face in this country is not the one that everybody is talking about. There is a far worse crisis than the confrontation between the Bush Administration and Congress, a crisis that is corroding the fabric of democracy in a far worse manner than the criminality of Bush and Company, and that is the effect of moneyed interest on, the control that it has established over, the political process in this country at all levels.

What is the risk to which Kevin Drum refers? It’s the risk to reelection. It’s the risk of prematurely ending a political dynasty.

We are governed now by political dynasties; Kennedys, Bushes, Clintons, et al. No doubt Jeb Bush will be the next president after eight years of Hillary Clinton, and after eight years of him it will be time for, perhaps, Chelsea. Congressmen and Senators, short of copulating with a goat on the steps of the capitol building, serve for life and then their children run for office based on name recognition.

One article after another speaks to waste and fraud in government and finishes with the fond hope that in just over a year things will get better when the Democrats take over. If things get better at all, the difference will be marginal, because the waste and fraud are prompted by the moneyed interests who profit from it and they have purchased both parties equally. Whether you are a Democrat or a Republican you cannot perpetuate your dynasty without the large amounts of cash provided by corporate sponsors.

On the rare occasion the someone does “screw the goat” and get replaced, in very short order we find that, rather than installing a fresh viewpoint and different behavior, we have merely started a new dynasty.