The "system" is totally broken. No matter where you look it is smashed to bits. And infrastructure is falling apart perhaps in physical sympathy with the governmental breakdowns we are experiencing. What are we to do?
The more we investigate what is going wrong the more goes wrong. We cannot keep up with the deterioration. There are forces at work that have clamped its jaws on our country and even as we struggle to free ourselves clamps ever higher and ever more deadly to our body politic. Those continuing crises are the feature not a bug. They keep us off center and unable to mount a coherent campaign against the causes. As we are angry about the NSA spying, along comes Boehner with his tbaggers threatening to shut down the government. We can't pivot fast enough to keep up. And there is a purpose to this madness.
It seems pretty bad. We cannot get a grasp of the monumental character of the problem We can only seem to touch on aspects of it. Yes the monied interests have weighed in and impacted our ability to get just laws and policies. Yes the news media has become fossilized within corporations and no longer give us real news. Yes the Republicans have decided that tearing down the government is better than being patient until it is their turn again.
But what if the real problem is our inability to see through the myths like say, the "invisible hand" myth that says that capitalism is self correcting?
What if our faith in our government structure was based on a similarly flawed myth like say the democratic form of government has three branches and that creates a "balance of power"?
Remember:
See, in my line of work you got to keep repeating things over and over and over again for the truth to sink in, to kind of catapult the propaganda.
-- George W. Bush [Dumbya], May, 2005, when attempting to promote privatizing Social Security
If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it. The lie can be maintained only for such time as the State can shield the people from the political, economic and/or military consequences of the lie. It thus becomes vitally important for the State to use all of its powers to repress dissent, for the truth is the mortal enemy of the lie, and thus by extension, the truth is the greatest enemy of the State.
-- Joseph Goebbels
To get past all of the myths and the propaganda we need to step out of the way of ourselves a moment. We have to be willing to see the whole without flinching.
The attack on our first amendment rights is not a bug but a feature. The coordination across the country against the Occupy Wall Street Movement was not an overreaction, but a massive shutdown on a movement that threatened to educate the mass of folks who were sitting on the sidelines. It was a massive shutdown using fear and brutality in such a way that people were stunned and rightfully frightened.
The attack on our education is not a bug but a feature. It is no accident that people who are not educated very well are easily manipulated. They simply have not been given the tools to question and they are put in a situation where they are easily intimated because of their lack of tools by the "elites"
The attack on our environment is massive and represents a corporate culture that recognizes no boundaries. Corporations are not people and corporations have no concept of mortality. Corporation have no ethics and they have no inner conscience that will stop them when they go too far. In essence, corporations are like armies. They are made of people who have a group think, for the most part, and a motivation to win at all costs.
The continuing meltdown of our mainstream media to just 6 corporations is not a bug but a feature. All the ideas of trust busting have gone away. Instead there is a continual insistence on making our laws free of regulations and easy on corporations. So easy that now a good deal of them don't even pay taxes.
To understand the total lack of conscience and ethics with our corporations, just look at the mountain leveling to get at coal. No amount of pollution will stop those folks and no amount of terraforming in a negative sense makes any difference to their profit motive. Same is true for the oil pollution that occurs continually within the oceans and along the pipelines. What hasn't happened before but is happening with regularity now is the subservience of our governmental bodies to the oil companies and the coal companies.
The attack on campaign finance reform definitely is not a bug but a feature. We know now that the Koch Bros. and their ilk have be rigorously creating whole sets of laws both at the state and the federal level that literally rip the foundation out from under our democracy. And the Kochs have gone so far as to subvert the integrity of that body by sucking in Thomas and his wife Ginny and Scalia.
The attack on our privacy and our freedom to associate is not a bug but a feature. It allows the government to squash movements as they are budding, before they have a chance to flower. And it helps squelch leaks and whistle blowing.
The huge attack on whistle blowers and the smearing of them definitely isn't and accident as the governmental bodies do NOT want you to understand what the whistle blowers are telling you.
The killing of the department of justice as a true justice mechanism definitely is not a bug but a feature as far as the monied class is concerned. So the lack of conscience and ethics and humanity that impacts the corporate way of doing things has seeped into the government which is no accident as people move from the corporate world to the government and back again with rapidity.
Think tanks seem to be a mechanism by which the monied classes move their agenda into the public sphere. All of those "republican talking points" did not come into being without considerable effort and testing.
The "bubble" is no accident. The beltway media, the "advisers" and department heads and the pols all have the same bubble speak. There is little room in there for reality. Reality is what happens to you and me, not to those folks.
If we put our reliance on the electoral process these things have to happen:
First of all, to have the "democratic" portion of government to work at all means that people who vote have a really clear eyed view of who and what they are voting for. In a country where education is skimped upon as the first casualty of any fiscal problem that means the citizens who are responsible for voting for a government elected official may not have the tools to discern who and what is good or bad. It means they will be handicapped at the voting booth. So we have to create a massive educational drive in order to change the dynamic.
Second, the informant to the electorate must be able to give good information, information not biased or tainted in any way, so that the citizenry has access to the information they need to make good choices. We have to create with rigor and intensity a new media that is accessible to all without a bias that both those who are naturally liberal and those who are naturally authoritarian find easy and informative and a go to place right before elections without fear of being manipulated.
Third, the people who are the candidates should be people of integrity and intelligence. We will have to create a new paradigm for pols. There has to be a new way of selecting them and supporting them through an election. Left to their own devices they will just lie and tell us what we want to hear and then do whatever the wealthy tell them to do.
Fourth, even as we work on these things, it is for darn certain that the next crisis will come into being to keep on moving us further and further into a corner. We have to find ways to counter this. We have to find ways to upend that so that WE are using the crisis to create the world that WE want.
And the harder piece: Fifth we have to KNOW WHAT WE WANT and push our own agenda and be ready for these ready made crisis to push our own.
Our task is huge and represents need to create paths where none exist now.