Business as Usual

--Growing New Terrorists, Arend Van Dam
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It must needs be, therefore, that the greater part
of the people are deceived by that indiscriminate
and highsounding promise of release from penalty
--95 Theses, Martin Luther

To worry, worry, super-scurry
Call the troops out in a hurry
This is what we've waited for
This is it boys, this is war
--99 Luftballoons, Nena

A government big enough to give you everything
you want is a government big enough
to take from you everything you have
--President Gerald Ford
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What happened here was the gradual habituation of the people, little by little, to being governed by surprise; to receiving decisions deliberated in secret; to believing that the situation was so complicated that the government had to act on information which the people could not understand, or so dangerous that, even if the people could not understand it, it could not be released because of national security. And their sense of identification with Hitler, their trust in him, made it easier to widen this gap and reassured those who would otherwise have worried about it.

--They Thought They Were Free: The Germans, 1933-45, Mayer, Milton

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More thoughts on (non-) representative democracy:

We have come to reflect the Afghan and Iraqi reality when we have elections for representatives that fail to implement the will of the people through policy and doctrinal changes. Elections are not the yardsticks of democracy, but rather a simple tool for effecting democracy.

How can we talk of a two-party system when both parties are opposite sides of the same coin? Democracy is not working for the benefit of the common man, hardly a newsflash. Many of our Founders were suspicious of the party system for the very real reason we are suffering today -- the polarization of the nation. For that reason, George Washington never declared a party affiliation. He was the president of the entire United States.

Not only are we polarized, but we are so to no good effect. Neither party seems capable of defining fiscal responsibility. Though neither party can balance the budget or reduce unemployment, both parties favor tax reduction while conducting two wars, and allowing predatory mortgages and credit card rules.

Obama's policies differ little from Bush's, aside from his vaunted Obamacare -- a supposed insurance reformation in which the insurance companies rather than the citizenry are the actual beneficiaries of a mandatory windfall. Ditto the Medicare Drug Program under George Bush. Ditto the Homeland Security apparatus gaining windfalls from the Phony Wars on Terror (PWOT ©) With both parties, the winners are the corporations.

The erosion of our personal liberties continues in the name of fear and incompetence, and neither party will try in a court of law (or release) prisoners held without any provable offense. Both parties agree on the question of assassination and dropping missiles on suspected terrorists. Both parties fail to afford presumption of innocence when considering extrajudicial death sentences upon U.S. citizens.

Why do we vote and persist in the illusion that we are a representative democracy?

We are too big for representative democracy, and representative democracy is not too big too fail.