As a number of people have pointed out, the left-right terms no longer work. This article proposes alternate terminology that better fits today's reality.

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Terminology History

The political terms 'left' and 'right' originated with the French Revolution of 1789 having to do with people sitting on the right of the King (supporters of the King) and on the left of the King (supporters of the Revolution).  Today, we have the left composed mostly of Democrats (blue) and the right composed mostly of Republicans (red).

Corporate Control

However, this political spectrum conveniently hides the fact that most of our politicians on both sides are bought by corporations. These politicians make decisions favoring corporations to the detriment of the citizens they are supposed to represent.

There may be no direct bribery, but corporations clearly get their way. As Alan Grayson noted, a lobbyist can come to a candidate and say "I have a million dollars and I can spend it for you or against you, depending on whether you support 'x'. So what's it going to be?" And usually these positions are contrary to the needs of their constituents (or the bribery would not be necessary). Sadly, studies show a very high correlation (approximately 94%) between a candidate spending the most money on a campaign and the success of that campaign. Follow the money.

Using the metaphor from the Occupy Movement, 99% of the elected members of our government respond to the desires of 1% of the population, and 1% of them respond to the needs of 99% of the population.

Money and Politics

Make no mistake, corporations are not spending huge amounts of money on political campaigns because they want to be good citizens. They spend it on campaigns because it works. They get what they pay for - their bottom line and the stockholders benefit from their "investment". Whether to spend money on a political campaign is a business decision, plain and simple.

A recent example of the "benefit" of fraud is GlaxoSmithKline being forced to pay a $3B fine. But the fraudulent marketing campaign resulted in an income of about $27B. Given that corporations are required to maximize profit for stockholders, perpetrating the fraud was clearly a good business decision. Studies show that for every $1 a company spends on bribery (or euphemistically, "lobbying"), they get return of $16.

You want to discourage this behavior? Convict the individuals making these "good business decisions" and the politicians, and put them in a real jail, not a country club. Make the fine that companies pay be greater than the profit from their fraud. But the government does not do this because the politicians running the government want to be re-elected so they promote this charade of punishment. And the mainstream media is complicit because they refuse to ask the tough questions. Instead, they distract us with the sordid details of the latest celebrity melt-down.

And the result of this class warfare (declared by the rich on the unwitting Middle Class) is the devastation of the Middle Class. The war has been going on for decades, and as billionaire Warren Buffet says, "My class is winning".

We're heading toward corporate feudalism with no Middle Class, similar to the Middle Ages, when society consisted of nobility and serfs. The Middle Class did not exist. All the progress the Middle Class has made in the last several hundred years is vanishing.

Polls show that the vast majority of people understand the corrosive effect that money has on our politics and they favor eliminating at the very least the recent disastrous Supreme Court decision. Unfortunately, the majority of the Supreme Court is deliberately ignorant of that effect, and thus a Constitutional Amendment will be required. I made a video in support of one of the organizations involved in this effort.

Left and Right Bifurcation is an Illusion

Both the left and the right wings of our political system are under corporate control - a classic definition of fascism.  And our old terminology of "left-right", just like our political system, is failing us. That old terminology perpetuates the illusion of opposites when the powerful people of both the left and right are essentially in partnership against us. As Jesse Ventura observed, politics is a lot like professional wrestling, except in wrestling, the spectators know the fight is rigged and the adversaries are really friends behind the scenes.

Reframing the Conversation

The people in favor of the status quo of bribery have been very successful in large part because of their success at framing the conversation in terms beneficial to their agenda. If we are to be successful at recovering our country, we must understand what they're doing, and reframe conversations in our favor.  Our political discourse needs a new paradigm, a new spectrum on which to place people and organizations that illustrates whether they tend to side with corporations or people.

New Paradigm

Even though a one-dimensional model is a simplification of politics, it does promote dialog and allows for a shortcut in political discourse. But because the left vs right dividing line is obsolete, we need new terminology.

The two extremes of this new spectrum are:
- the state is run for the benefit of corporations
- the state is run for the benefit of citizens

At one extreme (favoring corporations) you'll find both fascism (right-wing) and communism (left wing).  At the other extreme is populism. I hesitate to use the accurate term 'socialism' here, even though it means, in the classic sense, the country being run for the benefit of the citizens rather than corporations. But unfortunately, most people don't know what the term means, although they believe it's bad because the corporate news says it's bad. They don't know that many of our institutions from which they benefit are socialist - infrastructure (roads, etc.), insurance, police, fire, libraries, schools, Social Security, Medicare, and even the military because they have socialistic health care.

The Occupy Movement has already successfully coined the terms "1%" and "99%" so that they have become part of the mainstream conversation, but using those terms for this new spectrum implies that if you're in the 1%, you favor corporate policies and that's not necessarily true.

Instead, I propose that we use a metaphor from the Civil War (the South had slavery, and the North was free) and adopt the terms reflecting the economic slavery of corporate control:

south-wing - benefiting the rich and corporations
north-wing - benefiting most citizens

The metaphor fits quite well in addition, because the Southern leaders were able to convince many conscientious Southerners who didn't own slaves that the Civil War was about freedom - a second War of Independence - instead of being about the protection of the brutal institution of slavery, which benefited only the rich. Similarly, today, the south-wing leaders are successfully convincing a large number of people to support south-wing policies, even though these policies are against these people's own economic self-interest.

Distract and Divide

By focusing on wedge issues (gay marriage, religion, etc.) rather than issues that will determine whether our species survives (nuclear weapons, energy, global warming, the economy, etc.), they preserve the illusion that the battle is between left and right. The politicians (with a few notable exceptions on both sides) can continue to keep people divided and voting for tweedle-dum or tweedle-dee, both of whom are in the south-wing, instead of unifying behind somebody in the north-wing who would really make a difference to the status quo.

The great Jerry Garcia of the Grateful Dead once said: "If you're made to pick the lesser of two evils, you're still picking evil, aren't you?"

And the result of this fraud is a vast increase in the economic chasm between the very rich and everybody else which, as history has shown, will destroy us. The ancient Roman writer Plutarch observed that "An imbalance between rich and poor is the oldest and most fatal ailment of all republics."

Economic Inequality

There is nothing inherently wrong with being part of the rich 1%. Economic inequality is a fact of life. And 1% of a population is in the top 1% by definition. In fact, some of the people who are in the top 1% wealth group can actually be in the north-wing depending on their views. The real issue is how people got rich - was it through honest hard work? Or was it by gaming the system by bribing politicians and relying on corporate welfare while claiming to have built their businesses and become wealthy on their own? And, as Elizabeth Warren observed, that's not to mention they've probably used roads that we all paid for, and hired employees that we all paid to educate.

One of the purposes of government is to provide boundaries to the economic playing field so that the greedy and the criminals don't harm us and things don't get out of whack. The problem is that the greedy south-wing has gamed the system, and the boundaries are in some cases non-existent. As a result, we have huge economic inequalities that are destroying our economy.

The question we should ponder is whether an economy is healthy if 1% of the population owns 99% of the wealth. We're not there yet, but we're relentlessly heading in that direction under both parties. If you agree that this level of inequality is not healthy, then the public conversation we need to have is how to correct our unhealthy system.  As the Chinese Proverb says, "If you don't change direction, you're likely to end up where you're headed." But we can't have an honest and productive conversation if some of the people in the conversation have been bribed.

The current situation is a lot like an incurable and fatal disease due to a virus which attacks a host person. The virus thrives and multiplies in its greed, but eventually it kills the host, and then the virus dies as well. The south-wing is destroying our country (and eventually will destroy themselves) by their myopic greed - the classic case of "killing the goose that lays the golden eggs".

Politicians

Neither Bush nor Obama has done anything substantive to clean up Wall Street, and if Romney is elected, we can be sure he will do nothing as well.  All have accepted huge amounts of money from Wall Street sources, so it should be no surprise that it's "business as usual". Clinton championed the repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act to pay back Wall Street for their contributions. Thus, the last three Presidents (in fact, most of the presidents for the past 50+ years), as well as most of Congress and the Supreme Court would be regarded as in the south-wing, and thus, against us.

On the other hand, there are a few politicians who are north-wing, and thus are worthy of support. They are willing to speak out for us in spite of the culture of bribery.  For instance, Dennis Kucinich and Bernie Sanders on the left, and Ron Paul on the right are north-wing.

Organizations

Both the Tea Party and Occupy were originally populist movements. But thanks to the mainstream media, casual observers might think there's a world of difference between the two organizations. The Tea Party is right-wing, and Occupy is left-wing, and never the twain shall meet.

However, the basis of the Tea Party, for at least the members who don't merely parrot what corporate news tells them to think, was a reaction to corporate and governmental control and perceived over-taxation. Occupy too was a reaction against corporate and Wall Street control of our government and us. Unfortunately, the Tea Party has been co-opted by the south-wing and has been turned into another organization promoting the agenda of corporations. The individual members and supporters of the Tea Party may be very sincere, and think they are supporting a north-wing organization, but they are unaware that they are merely being used by the south-wing.

If we plot the two groups (Occupy, and the original Tea Party) on the new spectrum, we find that both groups lie on the same side - that of the north-wing - populism. But the corporate media is desperate to keep the two groups as antagonists - divide and conquer. The "co-opt and redirect" approach has worked against the Tea Party, but has failed against Occupy.  Thus, Occupy is still north-wing, but the Tea Party has become fundamentally south-wing.

Other "astro-turf" organizations (faux populist organizations), such as American Future Funds, Freedom Works, and Crossroads GPS, are quite effective in giving the appearance of being north-wing, but in fact, they are organized, controlled, and directed by the south-wing.

Great Minds Think Alike

Perhaps as a result of the "Hundredth Monkey Effect", as I was composing this article, I ran across a piece by Kenneth LaFave titled "Left, Right, Left, Right".  His article is targeting the same issue but from different perspective.

This is an idea whose time has come. Let's start using this new terminology.

Authors Website: http://www.kinzelman.com

Authors Bio:

I was a computer engineer for ~25 years, now I've changed careers and am flying. Currently I'm flying freight on Caravans. I was at SkyWest flying a CRJ as a First Officer. And previous to that I was flying as a First Officer in a Lear Jet air ambulance. I'm also on the Board of Directors of the NM Chapter of www.Represent.US

And I ran for NM State Representative in the 2020 election!
See: www.VotePaulK.org

I've been rabblerousing for years, got on the Board of Directors of a $400M Credit Union, interesting story, me a technical weenie, story at http://www.kinzelman.com/govt/dcu/dcucamp.html