Key Questions For Presidential Candidates
Here in America we have a surplus of serious problems, but one suspects that many of them are traceable to a main root cause. My questions for our 2020 candidates are: (1) Can you identify the primary root cause of America’s faltering experiment in creating the “shining example on the hill”? (2) Can you offer specific, succinct, actions that our country might take to rectify this alarming situation.
Obviously, no actual candidates are ever going to read this Medium piece, far less respond to it. But, if I could coerce all of the candidates to offer their answers, I would be looking for the one brave enough to answer as follows:
(1) Bribery and corruption of elected officials by the relatively tiny number of people in a position to do so in order to achieve their selfish goals.
(2) Work tirelessly for a Constitutional Amendment that would make it a federal crime to bribe or corrupt an elected official using money, threats, travel junkets, lucrative revolving door offers, or any other means to undermine the democratic integrity of those elected officials, or to accept any form of bribery.
You might ask why I picked political bribery, politely referred to as influence peddling, as the main root cause of many of our worst problems. Well, consider these case-in-point problems.
a. Obscene Income Inequality. It is a no-brainer that super-rich power brokers like the Koch Network (see Janet Mayer’s book Dark Money) and Wall Street’s High Priests created this disaster and want to keep it in place for obvious reasons. They buy politicians who will sell their souls to get re-election funding. Also, they “primary” anyone who does not play along with them in their monopoly game.
b. Environmental Apocalypse. The same perps want full speed ahead for their brand of cut-throat capitalism, especially the energy tycoons and their associated equipment, operations, legal, media and publicity contractors. The very real the issues of over-population, pollution, extinctions and climate change have been subjected to intense lobbying efforts to deny the issues entirely, or to use demagogic methods to create misinformation, confusion and doubt.
c. Endless (and usually bone-headed) War. War and arm sales are good for our military-industrial tycoons; they want to make billions and do not seem to worry about the death and misery that are the collateral damage of their sales. Their lobbying efforts are legendary and the results are all too obvious.
d. Poverty. If you want obscene wealth, it must be extracted from somebody besides the obscenely rich. There is intense lobbying of our elected officials to keep wages low, keep bankruptcy very difficult or impossible for most of us, put many of us deep in debt and then charge gross interest rates, discourage good unions and corrupt corruptible unions, lower taxes on the super-wealthy, ensure a tax code with more loop holes than barrel of Swiss cheese, etc.
e. Gerrymandering and Voter Suppression. It is the politicians who run these anti-democratic crimes, but it is the oligarchs who run the politicians.
f. Gun Violence. The NRA and the corporate goons who fund them have made America an extreme outlier in this area, as comparison with other countries clearly shows. Politicians are very reluctant to put a stop to this outrage. Lots of “thoughts and prayers” and promises of action, but then there is only silence and inaction. They are bought and paid for.
Well, the list could go on, but you get the point. The American Experiment is faltering and will ultimately fail unless we the people and some brave elected officials put an end to this main root problem. It is a crime against our Democracy. Complacency enables it’s ever-increasing brazenness.