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As The Political System Melts Down, The Public Wants A "Change"
By Danny Schechter
Author of The Crime Of Our Time
Is It Time For A New "WE Party?"
They seem to be dropping like flies, as the old saying goes. Now, New Jersey Senator Lautenberg has been diagnosed with Cancer. Last week, Senator Bayh said sayonara to the Senate. The week before, Jack Murtha of Pennsylvania died somewhat mysteriously on the operating table with the Navy now investigating.
In a sense, this growing body count is a metaphor for a larger die-off--a death of democracy itself with the Supreme Court giving corporations the status of persons while the political system has been paralyzed by self-serving partisanship in a poisonous cloud of ideological extremism calling itself conservatism (while conserving nothing!).
The followup to the sad spectacle of that wannabe software entrepreneur who flew a plane into an IRS office based on a legitimate grievance with a tax code provision inserted initially to benefit IBM and other big companies that was legitimate.
Sadder, still, was the disclosures that, despite attempts over decades to eliminate the rule by Presidents and members of both parties, nothing was done.
Nothing ever seems to get done.
So this angry Texan went berserk, borrowing a tactic from the al Qaeda playbook.
Perhaps that's a symptom of why the public is so disgusted, regardless of party. Disillusion is turning into despair with a system that goes on almost robotically with increasingly no connection with the public. A CNN poll shows a majority of Americans say the government is "broken."
Happily, despite the breakdown of government, there is growing anger with a private sector, which is, if anything, much worse and less accountable to the extent that the legislative branch is accountable at all.
A new Zogby Poll reports:
"Likely voters now have even less confidence in the nation's large financial and business institutions than they do in both the federal and state governments. In contrast, small business and local banks earned very high levels of confidence.
The survey asked confidence levels for all levels of government, business and finance, as well some other major institutions that impact the economy and society."
But that's not all. A Rasmussen poll goes further according to NakedCapitalism.com, finding:
