THE POWER PARTY
For the past generation American democracy has been a pretense. There can be no democracy when power controls so absolutely that it homogenizes the differences between our major parties, turning them into irrelevant, posturing puppets.
The political party that has gained such power has no name, no logo, not even a color – but it does have an all-encompassing cause: Control. For identifying purposes here, we’ll call it the Power Party. It has two main factions: the Democratic Party and the Republican Party. Most people have been saying for years that they can’t tell the difference between them. They are right. There is very little difference and as the years pass those slight differences evaporate.
Controlled power has been so complete that key societal systems like healthcare, education, criminal justice and finance continue to deteriorate despite seeming efforts to improve them. They function because they make money for and buttress the power structure controlling them.
This power structure assumed control of the government by dominating and then overwhelming the process of democracy with assurances of continued employment of elected officials as long as they played their assigned roles.
Big Brother you suggest? Only if you know the literature of the 1960’s can you see the remarkable foresight. Call it what you will, government no longer serves the interests of people only the interests of the few who literally own it. Lucky elected officials remain silent. And the public response? It no longer votes.
In the recent New York City Mayoral campaign, the Mayor was elected by a majority of 18% of eligible voters; 32% of eligible voters reelected a Governor in New York and about the same number reelected a President in 2008.
If only one party controls a society and members of that society no longer vote, the illusion of a democracy is all that is left.
What every democracy needs is a system with at least two parties. At its inception in the mid-20th Century the Liberal Party became the first successful “third party” or minority party. Today in the first quarter of the 21st Century, the Liberal Party sees itself as the second party in a redeveloping democratic system.
A NEW PLACE
To further their cause the Liberal Party of the mid-20th Century wrote and passed liberal legislation in New York State so definitive and powerful that it influenced the tide of liberalism throughout the nation. The Liberal Party focused on every aspect of human needs: establishing the middle class, housing and fair rent laws, fair labor laws and the development of unions, a minimum wage, education for all with no economic or racial barriers and decent wages for teachers, healthcare that would reach and cover every American, civil rights and civil liberties, separation of church and state, a woman’s right to choose.
Today the Liberal Party will work to return the American middle class as we reintroduce the core economic humanism that made America the greatest nation in the history of the world.
To do so we will have to go beyond the selection of candidates with liberal views to help find and elect those who understand that this nation is about people and freedom first. We need candidates who recognize that if we level the playing field of opportunity, then real opportunity exists for the many not just the few; candidates who will work to restore the systems which once worked so well for so many and now work so badly for so many.
HEALTHCARE which has opened the door to health coverage for so many millions and developed the remarkable Medicare system but is still overwhelmingly controlled lock, stock and doctors by the health insurance and pharmaceutical industries free of government oversight in all but the most elementary ways.
EDUCATION which made this country the greatest in history through a system of public education which could and did literally educate the masses – the secret behind our unparalleled productivity and creativity – has now become the property of privatization, controlled by the establishment which for its own profit might be trying to destroy it; by Schools of Education who no longer produce qualified teachers – more than 60% of them leave the system every year before they have completed five years as a teacher; by incompetent politicians who replace learning with testing and ignore what is being done to simply pass children along as if they were fodder on a cattle line; and a higher education system in a business arrangement with banks to provide loans to all who wish to enter – whether they can deal with the ever-inflating costs or not.
FINANCE where despite the essential collapse of our financial system in 2009, the very same bad actors are changing reform legislation back to the same old way of doing things…no matter the outcome as long as they gain profit. Recognizing the power and success of the now global capitalist free market system also means we must recognize ‘free market’ as an oxymoron – there is nothing free about totally controlled markets open to unfettered, unregulated trading. That has to stop once and for all.
REAL ESTATE INTERESTS, working with mortgage companies and financial institutions are beginning again to use mortgages as ‘secure’ investments; they are using auto loans the same way. One step forward, two steps back.
NEW LEGISLATION will have to be created, written and ‘sold’ to legislatures and a Congress owned by the Power Party. No one denies that this ownership exists. Those in political employment make believe the public neither cares nor understands what has happened. It is a reasonable belief given the very poor voting turnouts which have permitted the takeover and demise of our prized democracy. We as a people can continue to deny this reality, can ignore our responsibility to vote, and every year we do that we fall deeper under control.
But the Liberal Party’s determination to stop that fall from grace will find life in New York and elsewhere thanks to the very social networks so tuned into the needs and wants of people.
That inter-connected, personalized communication system now so superior to what existed 75 years ago, will both insure and speed up the messages that must be heard.