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Published on Tuesday, August 5, 2008 by TomDispatch.com
<http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/174963/thomas_frank_washington_s_lords_of_c
reation>  

Follow This Dime
Why Misgovernment Was No Accident in George W. Bush’s Washington


by Thomas Frank

Washington is the city where the scandals happen. Every American knows this,
but we also believe, if only vaguely, that the really monumental scandals
are a thing of the past, that the golden age of misgovernment-for-profit
ended with the cavalry charge and the robber barons, at about the same time
presidents stopped wearing beards.

I moved to Washington in 2003, just in time for the comeback, for the
hundred-year flood. At first it was only a trickle in the basement, a little
stream released accidentally by the president’s friends at Enron. Before
long, though, the levees were failing all over town, and the city was
inundated with a muddy torrent of graft.

How are we to dissect a deluge like this one? We might begin by categorizing
the earmarks handed out by Congress, sorting the foolish earmarks from the
costly earmarks from the earmarks made strictly on a cash basis. We could
try a similar approach to government contracting: the no-bid contracts, the
no-oversight contracts, the no-experience contracts, the contracts handed
out to friends of the vice president. We might consider the shoplifting
career of one of the president’s former domestic policy advisers or the
habitual plagiarism of the president’s liaison to the Christian right. And
we would certainly have to find some way to parse the extraordinary
incompetence of the executive branch, incompetence so fulsome and steady and
reliable that at some point Americans stopped being surprised and began
simply to count on it, to think of incompetence as the way government works.

But the onrushing flow swamps all taxonomies. Mass firing of federal
prosecutors; bribing of newspaper columnists; pallets of shrink-wrapped cash
“misplaced” in Iraq; inexperienced kids running the Baghdad stock exchange;
the discovery that many of Alaska’s leading politicians are apparently on
the take — our heads swim. We climb to the rooftop, but we cannot find the
heights of irony from which we might laugh off the blend of thug and
Pharisee that was Tom DeLay — or dispel the nauseating suspicion, quickly
becoming a certainty, that the government of our nation deliberately fibbed
us into a pointless, catastrophic war.

Bad Apples All Around

So let us begin on the solid ground of these simple facts: this spectacular
episode of misrule has coincided with both the political triumph of
conservatism and with the rise of the Washington area to the richest rank of
American metropolises. In the period I am describing, gentlemen of the right
rolled through the capital like lords of creation. Every spigot was open,
and every indulgence slopped out for their gleeful wallowing. All the
clichés roared at full, unembarrassed volume: the wines gurgled, the T-bones
roasted, the golf courses beckoned, the Learjets zoomed, the contractors’
glass buildings sprouted from the earth, and the lobbyists’ mansions grew
like brick-colonial mushrooms on the hills of northern Virginia.

Democrats, for their part, have tried to explain the flood of misgovernment
as part of a “culture of corruption,” a phrase at once obviously true and
yet so amorphous as to be quite worthless. Republicans have an even simpler
answer: government failed, they tell us, because it is the nature of
government enterprises to fail. As for the great corruption cases of recent
years, they cluck, each is merely a one-of-a-kind moral lapse unconnected to
any particular ideology — an individual bad apple with no effect on the
larger barrel.

Which leaves us to marvel helplessly at what appears to be a spectacular run
of lousy luck. My, what a lot of bad apples they are growing these days!

Corruption is uniquely reprehensible in a democracy because it violates the
system’s first principle, which we all learned back in the sunshiny days of
elementary school: that the government exists to serve the public, not
particular companies or individuals or even elected officials. We Are the
Government, insisted the title of a civics primer published in the earnest
year of 1945. “The White House belongs to you,” its dust jacket told us. “So
do all the other splendid buildings in Washington, D.C. For you are a
citizen of the United States.” For you, young citizen, does the Post Office
carry letters to every hamlet in the nation. For you does the Department of
Agriculture research better plowing methods and the Bureau of Labor
Statistics add up long columns of numbers.

The government and its vast workforce serve the people: The idea is so deep
in the American grain that we can’t bring ourselves to question it, even in
this disillusioned age. Republicans and Democrats may fight over how big
government should be and exactly what it should do, but almost everyone
shares those baseline good intentions, we believe, that devotion to the
public interest.

We continue to believe this in even the most improbable circumstances. Take
the worst apple of them all, lobbyist Jack Abramoff, whose astonishing
career as a corruptionist has been unreeling in newspaper and congressional
investigations since I came to Washington. Abramoff started out as a great
political success story, a protégé and then a confidant of the leaders of
the conservative faction of the Republican Party. But his career
disintegrated on news of the inventive ways he ripped off his clients and
the luxury meals and lavish trips with which he bribed legislators.

Journalistic coverage of the Abramoff affair has stuck closely to the “bad
apple” thesis, always taking pains to separate the conservative movement
from its onetime superstar. What Abramoff represented was “greed gone wild,”
asserts the most authoritative account on the subject. He “went native,” say
others. Above all, he was “sui generis,” a one-of-a-kind con man, “engaged
in bizarre antics that your average Zegna-clad Washington lobbyist would
never have dreamed of.”

In which case, we can all relax: Jack Abramoff’s in jail. The system worked;
the bad apple has been plucked; the wild greed and the undreamed-of antics
have ceased.

Misgovernment by Ideology

But the truth is almost exactly the opposite, whether we are discussing
Abramoff or the wider tsunami of corruption. The truth is as obvious as a
slab of sirloin and yet so obscured by decades of pettifoggery that we find
it almost impossible to apprehend clearly. The truth slaps your face in
every hotel lobby in town, but we still don’t get the message.

It is just this: Fantastic misgovernment of the kind we have seen is not an
accident, nor is it the work of a few bad individuals. It is the consequence
of triumph by a particular philosophy of government, by a movement that
understands the liberal state as a perversion and considers the market the
ideal nexus of human society. This movement is friendly to industry not just
by force of campaign contributions but by conviction; it believes in
entrepreneurship not merely in commerce but in politics; and the inevitable
results of its ascendance are, first, the capture of the state by business
and, second, all that follows: incompetence, graft, and all the other
wretched flotsam that we’ve come to expect from Washington.

The correct diagnosis is the “bad apple” thesis turned upside down. There
are plenty of good conservative individuals, honorable folks who would never
participate in the sort of corruption we have watched unfold over the last
few years. Hang around with grassroots conservative voters in Kansas, and in
the main you will find them to be honest, hardworking people. Even our
story’s worst villains can be personally virtuous. Jack Abramoff, for
example, is known to his friends as a pious, polite, and generous fellow.

But put conservatism in charge of the state, and it behaves very
differently. Now the “values” that rightist politicians eulogize on the
stump disappear, and in their place we can discern an entirely different set
of priorities — priorities that reveal more about the unchanging historical
essence of American conservatism than do its fleeting campaigns against gay
marriage or secular humanism. The conservatism that speaks to us through its
actions in Washington is institutionally opposed to those baseline good
intentions we learned about in elementary school.

Its leaders laugh off the idea of the public interest as airy-fairy
nonsense; they caution against bringing top-notch talent into government
service; they declare war on public workers. They have made a cult of
outsourcing and privatizing, they have wrecked established federal
operations because they disagree with them, and they have deliberately piled
up an Everest of debt in order to force the government into crisis. The
ruination they have wrought has been thorough; it has been a professional
job. Repairing it will require years of political action.

Conservatism-in-power is a very different beast from the conservatism we
meet on the streets of Wichita or the conservatism we overhear talking to
itself on the pages of Free Republic. For one thing, what conservatism has
done in its decades at the seat of power is fundamentally unpopular, and a
large percentage of its leaders have been men of eccentric ideas. While they
believe things that would get them laughed out of the American Sociological
Association, that only makes them more typical of the movement. And for all
their peculiarity, these people — Grover Norquist, Tom DeLay, Jack Abramoff,
Newt Gingrich, and the whole troupe of activists, lobbyists, and
corpora-trons who got their start back in the Reagan years — have for the
last three decades been among the most powerful individuals in America. This
wave of misgovernment has been brought to you by ideology, not incompetence.

Yes, today’s conservatives have disgraced themselves, but they have not
strayed from the teaching of their forefathers or the great ideas of their
movement. When conservatives appoint the opponents of government agencies to
head those government agencies; when they auction their official services to
the purveyor of the most lavish “golf weekend”; when they mulct millions
from groups with business before Congress; when they dynamite the Treasury
and sabotage the regulatory process and force government shutdowns — in
short, when they treat government with contempt — they are running true to
form. They have not done these awful things because they are bad
conservatives; they have done them because they are good conservatives,
because these unsavory deeds follow naturally from the core doctrines of the
conservative tradition.

And, yes, there has been greed involved in the effort — a great deal of
greed. Every tax cut, every cleverly engineered regulatory snafu saves
industry millions and perhaps even billions of dollars, and so naturally
securing those tax cuts and engineering those snafus has become a booming
business here in Washington. Conservative rule has made the capital region
rich, a showplace of the new plutocratic order. But this greed cannot be
dismissed as some personal failing of lobbyist or congressman, some
badness-of-apple that can be easily contained. Conservatism, as we know it,
is a movement that is about greed, about the “virtue of selfishness” when it
acts in the marketplace. In rightwing Washington, you can be a man of
principle and a boodler at the same time.

The Wrecking Crew in Full Swing

One of the instructive stories We Are the Government brought before
generations of schoolkids was the tale of a smiling dime whose wanderings
were meant to introduce us to the government and all that it does for us:
the miner who digs the ore for the dime has his “health and safety”
supervised by one branch of the government; the bank in which the dime is
stored enjoys the protection of a different branch, which “sees that [banks]
are safe places for people to keep their money”; the dime gets paid in tax
on a gasoline sale; it then lands in the pocket of a Coast Guard lieutenant,
who takes it overseas and spends it on a parrot, which is “quarantined for
ninety days” when the lieutenant brings it home. All of which is related
with the blithest innocence, as though taxes on gasoline and quarantines on
parrots were so obviously beneficial that they required little further
explanation.

Clearly, a more up-to-date version is required. So let us follow the dime as
it wends its way through our present-day capital. Its story, we will find,
is the reverse of what it was in 1945. That old dime was all about service,
about the things government could do for us. But the new dime is about
profit — about the superiority of private enterprise, about the huge sums
that can be squeezed out of federal operations. Instead of symbolizing good
government, the dime now shows us the wrecking crew in full swing.

Our modern dime first comes to Washington as part of some good citizen’s
taxes, and it leaves the U.S. Treasury in a payment to a company that has
been hired to do work on the nation’s ports. Back in 1945, the government
would have done the work itself, but now it uses contractors for such
things. This particular contractor knows how to win a bid, but it doesn’t
know how to do the work, so it subcontracts the job to another outfit. The
dime follows, and it eventually makes up a worker’s salary, who incorporates
it into his monthly car payment. From there it travels into the coffers of
an auto industry trade association, which happens to be very upset about a
rule proposed by a federal agency that would require cars to notify drivers
when their tire pressure is low.

So the trade association gives the dime to a Washington consultant who
specializes in fighting federal agencies, and this man launches challenge
after challenge to the studies that the agency is using in the tire-pressure
matter. It takes many years for the agency to make its way through the flak
thrown up by this clever fellow. Meanwhile, with his well-earned dime, he
buys himself a big house with nice white columns in front.

But this is only the beginning of the story. As we make our rounds of
conservative Washington, we glimpse something much greater than single acts
of incompetence or obstruction. We see a vast machinery built for our
protection reengineered into a device for our exploitation. We behold the
majestic workings of the free market itself, boring ever deeper into the
tissues of the state. Ultimately, we gaze upon one of the true marvels of
history: democracy buried beneath an avalanche of money.

Thomas Frank, the author of What’s the Matter with Kansas?, is the founding
editor of The Baffler, a contributing editor at Harper’s, and, most
recently, a columnist for the Wall Street Journal. His WSJ columns can be
read at his website <http://tcfrank.com/journalism/> . He lives, of course,
in Washington D.C. and this essay has been adapted from his new book, The
Wrecking Crew: How Conservatives Rule
<http://www.amazon.com/dp/0805079882?tag=commondreams-20&camp=0&creative=0&l
inkCode=as1&creativeASIN=0805079882&adid=1GWYV3XMP0MWB5PVSRMX&>
(Metropolitan Books, 2008).

>From the book The Wrecking Crew: How Conservatives Rule
<http://www.amazon.com/dp/0805079882?tag=commondreams-20&camp=0&creative=0&l
inkCode=as1&creativeASIN=0805079882&adid=1GWYV3XMP0MWB5PVSRMX&>  by Thomas
Frank, Copyright © 2008 by Thomas Frank. Reprinted by arrangement with
Metropolitan Books, an Imprint of Henry Holt and Company, LLC. All Rights
Reserved.

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40 Comments so far 


1.	

	DaveEriqat <http://daveeriqat.wordpress.com/>  August 5th, 2008 1:21
pm 

	Maybe the problem is government itself. It seems all governments
eventually become bloated, corrupt and tyrannical. I don’t think ours is so
“special” that it can avoid the same fate.

	Why do we need government at all? Ask yourself not what government
does for you, but what it does to you!

	Dave

2.	

	Cedar August 5th, 2008 1:25 pm 

	Now we know why God sends the flood.

3.	

	voodoo child August 5th, 2008 1:42 pm 

	or hoards of locust, which are the believers

4.	

	KaneJeeves August 5th, 2008 1:44 pm 

	Excellent article, but doesn’t take the last step. As John Dean has
shown us, Conservatism is at its root all about authoritariansim and
domination. What institution does *that* mindset spring from? Come on, it’s
that elephant of all elephants in the room
Old Testament Christianity. Until
we address the root of the problem conservatism will continue to rear its
ugly head.

5.	

	jlocke123 August 5th, 2008 1:49 pm 

	DaveEriqat: “Maybe the problem is government itself”

	“government itself”? As opposed to what, the jungle? Governments
around the world work fine. Democratic governments work great. There is
always some corruption but it is kept in check, except in Italy and America,
to name two outliers.

	I agree with the article in so much as government didn’t fail in the
US, it was demolished purposefully. The departments were privatized,
downsized and outsourced. Taxes were diverted to no-bid wasteful kickback
schemes. Legislation was outsourced to K street. The army was outsourced to
Blackwater. Voting was outsourced to Diebold. Debates were outsourced to the
Commission on Presidential Debates.

	If you take a gander at any of the working democratic models around
the world, you will find some experimentation along the same lines but not
to the same degree. What you have in America is a bunch of ideologues trying
to prove that government doesn’t work. They have only succeeded in proving
that they are unworthy of their posts.

6.	

	Stephen V. Riley August 5th, 2008 1:51 pm 

	Government is the problem only because the U.S. Congress is the
stooge for corporate capitalists 

	The Fortune 500 Corporations only employ ten percent of working
class America, is this not the tail waging the dog? 

	U.S. Citizens need to awaken to the massive injustices of corporate
capitalism and the lies contained within The Official State Religion of
America, the idolatry of capitalism, worshiping individual material success
over all human rights and obliterating all human values. 

	Rise up America, you have been duped for too long.

7.	

	scottstlouis August 5th, 2008 1:53 pm 

	I’ve argued for a few years that Bush has been quite sucessful at
accomplishing everything he & Cheney set out to accomplish.

8.	

	DaveEriqat <http://daveeriqat.wordpress.com/>  August 5th, 2008 1:59
pm 

	As a follow-up to my earlier comment, here’s more food for thought.

	* Who is responsible for most of the violence in the world?
* Who is committing the most heinous acts of inhumanity?
* Who is stealing your wealth through monetary inflation with greater
efficiency and stealth than any bank robber?
* Who is forcibly indoctrinating your children with beliefs you may not
agree with?
* Who is depriving people of desperately needed pain relief while forcibly
injecting schoolchildren with pharmaceutical drugs?
* Who is imprisoning citizens by the millions for victimless “crimes”?
* Who is tasering citizens for sadistic pleasure, strip searching them,
spying on their communications, and confiscating their laptop computers?
* Who is imposing burdensome – no, crushing – regulations on our small
businesses, the very engines of our economy?
* Who encouraged and fueled the housing bubble which is now deflating so
spectacularly?
* Who is spraying our skies with chemtrails and won’t tell us what these
substances are or why they are being sprayed?

	If “government” is your answer to every single one of the questions
above then maybe the question “progressive” web sites such as this should be
asking is, “Do we really need government?” (By the way, other governments
around the world are guilty of these offenses as well.)

	And another thing. I hear so many people talking about Obama as some
sort of savior. Does anybody seriously believe he’ll be one iota different
from the current decider? That government or politics will improve in the
slightest? That our nation’s policies will improve? Please! We fell for that
ruse in the 2006 election when Democrats swept the House, the Senate, state
governorships and legislatures. Did anything change? At all?

	Is Obama going to rescind the Patriot Act, dismantle the DHS,
terminate the government’s surveillance of us? No, these things will endure
and new, odious ones, such as mandatory health insurance, will be added to
the fray.

	Dave

9.	

	AllTogetherNow... August 5th, 2008 2:01 pm 

	as the republic must be taxed to pay for the expansion of the
empire, which secures the wealth of the ruling class, we might thank
conservatism for so arrogantly tipping its hand.

10.	

	Siouxrose August 5th, 2008 2:14 pm 

	Good posts.

	KANE JEEVES: Glad you mentioned that point. Christ really did bring
liberating teachings, that your neighbor is an extension of yourself, and it
MATTERS how you treat others. But the war-loving Romans had no interest in
changing the way they did business or ran an empire, so they continued all
the OLD ways and just added Jesus’ name as endorsement.

	Because so many take religion on the basis of “faith,” the subtext
of the arguments allegedly attributable to ‘god’ are seldom analyzed. When
the church (it WAS throughout Europe the Church-state for enough centuries
to do a thorough job of programming people to see THAT arrangement as all
that was possible, THE supposed singular prototype of “shared reality”)
pushes for a model that is by its own nature hierarchical, creating
divisions on the basis of gender, nationality, religious beliefs, etc it
sets up the ultimate rationale FOR war. And any religion that furthers the
ends of war, blasphems its own intended purpose. 

	The authoritarian mindset does well with systems of uniformity,
rules for everyone. These presume one size fits all and are anathema to a
diverse society or any notion of democracy. This is why to authoritarians
like Harriet Miers, the president “deserves” to be the unitary executive.
They are souls in search of a strict father, an American fuhrer to rein in
their own potentials to trespass against a stern law & order society. And
God help anyone who strays from THEIR view of what those laws and order
should be!

11.	

	ZeroPointField August 5th, 2008 2:23 pm 

	KaneJeeves

	This article is an excerpt from a Book. It is only the first step
with about 400 more to go. And you are adding the last step?

12.	

	ZeroPointField August 5th, 2008 2:28 pm 

	The systems of Laws and Regulations is NOT the problem.
They were created to keep most of the crooks out. But it seems to serves
only those who are borderline crooks. 

	Some of the folks in the penetentiaries are real threats to society.
Governement does keep some criminals in place. And by government, we should
also mean the thousands of people who are simply doing the job the
government was created for - keep on helping the people. 

	However, there is a flip side to every coin. In this case it is the
politicians who abuse their power over the government, and make it serve
only their vested interest.

13.	

	jlocke123 August 5th, 2008 2:42 pm 

	ZeroPointField: “However, there is a flip side to every coin. In
this case it is the politicians who abuse their power over the government,
and make it serve only their vested interest”

	We get this everywhere, not just the US. The difference I think is
that in functioning democracies, the government wrongdoing is often brought
to the attention of the opposition and the media. Decent civil servants have
self-respect and don’t like criminality any more than you or I. Appreciate
them before their jobs are all outsourced to Halliburton. Where it falls
down in the US is the lack of independent media and most of all a working
opposition. 

	Normally the press should be eager for stories of colossal
government illegality, not so in America. The lack of a healthy opposition
is essential as well. Why doesn’t the new york times ask the Greens what
they think about what the Government is doing. I’m sure they have something
to say.

14.	

	ezeflyer August 5th, 2008 2:42 pm 

	Change in the Conservative Personality Equals Change in the Offender
with a Resultant Reduction in Recidivism

	by Michael D. Parsons and Jennifer G. Parsons

	Abstract

	Offenders have many of the characteristics of the conservative
personality as defined by Adorno, Collins, Wilson, and Boshier. The
characteristics of the conservative personality limit change necessary for
rehabilitation. Until that personality is modified, it is very difficult to
reduce recidivism. Modification of the conservative personality through
education and environment can lead to change in the offender’s behavior.
Is it possible to reduce violence by the criminal offender during
incarceration? This paper presents the basis for a model which deals with
certain offenders through an educational effort to modify some of their
negative characteristics which include violence. The model in this paper is
based on the concept of a conservative/authoritarian personality as it is
found in offenders. The concept of the authoritarian personality remains
important today as evidenced by coverage in current introductory psychology
textbooks (Crooks & Stein, 1991; Dworetzky, 1991; Gleitman, 1991). “It
appears that conservatism has pathological dimensions manifested in violence
and distorted psycho-sexual development” (Boshier, 1983, p. 159). This is
supported by a study conducted by Walker, Rowe, and Quincey (1993) in which
there was a direct correlation between authoritarianism and sexually
aggressive behavior. An investigation done by Muehlenhard (1988) revealed
that rape justification and aggression toward subordinate individuals was
much higher in traditional (conservative personality) than non-traditional
personalities. It is postulated in this paper that the offender has a
conservative personality and, therefore, manifests that violence. 

	http://www.doc.state.ok.us/offenders/ocjrc/95/950725C.HTM

15.	

	Kathleen Perez August 5th, 2008 2:43 pm 

	Fortunately, Dave, I didn’t answer most of your questions with the
simplism “government”, and haven’t for quite some time. I’ve met enough
righteous anarchists in my lifetime to make me puke all the way from
California to Kennebunkport, and find them no less dogmatic then most of the
communists or libertarians, or for that matter, party line democrats they
spend most of their time arguing with. 

	You may well be the exception to the rule, and if so, that’s all
good. But I believe the litany of problems you cited are complex, and will
require much more of you, I, and all of our peoples then will be found in
any frozen set of ideas. If we could abolish the state in a country as
racist and classist as this one is tomorrow, we’d spend decades just trying
to keep the white supremists and property junkies from ruling the roost,
which would require some sort of armed defense, which, whether anarchists
like to admit it or not, is a form of the state.

	So can we sober up here?

16.	

	billjv August 5th, 2008 2:45 pm 

	One thing not mentioned in this article is the influence of secret
societies, the fraternal system, and the good ole boy networks, which serve
to feed this beast with individuals who are completely sworn in and sold out
to this ideology. This is the ultimate insider’s club. Nepotism, family
histories, and positioning for favor with the richest people in the world
all play a huge part in this. 

	One other aspect that is touched upon but not expounded on is
Religion. While the vast majority of these people put up fronts of being
“Good Christians” they do not actually believe any of it - they realize it’s
a way to excuse anything they might do, while also holding (as mentioned
above in another comment) an authoritarian hammer on the populace. I
remember so clearly when Tom DeLay was sentenced in court - he made some
comment as to how “The Lord had forgiven him and he was re-dedicating his
life to Christ”. I’m sorry, but that has to be the biggest crock of shit to
ever hit the air. The saddest part is that other good people who have been
duped into the Christian/Right-wing mindset sincerely believe him. Funny how
Christ must be selective - it didn’t help that death row woman from Texas
when Bush was Governor there.

17.	

	Sparkplug August 5th, 2008 2:46 pm 

	We need government for the same reason that we need toilets. So
nobody will shit in our living rooms. We know with some certainty that
sombody will in fact crap in our living room given the slightest
opportunity.

18.	

	greenerthanthou <http://wagelaborer.blogspot.com/>  August 5th, 2008
3:01 pm 

	I agree with scottslouis. This “incompetence” meme, pushed by the
“left”, just as the “bad apple” meme is pushed by the corporate media, is
wrong.

	They aren’t incompetent. They’ve taken over the government and used
it to loot the US treasury, turn over America’s natural riches to the greedy
and dominate the world militarily. And to turn New Orleans richer and
whiter. The difference with the Bush junta is that they dispensed with all
pretense of democracy or forms of avoiding the appearance of conflict of
interest. 

	DaveE is right. The looting may be more hidden under a Obama regime,
but the oppression will continue. Will the Patriot Act, the Military
commissions Act, the passport requirement to travel, the Real ID Act be
repealed? Do you hear any corporate candidate even mentioning these very
real oppressive Acts?

19.	

	greenerthanthou <http://wagelaborer.blogspot.com/>  August 5th, 2008
3:04 pm 

	And don’t forget the widespread practice of fingerprinting,
background checks and urine drug tests just to get a job in the “land of the
free”. (Always said without a trace of irony). 

	Will the practice of treating each person as a potential criminal,
guilty until proven innocent, be stopped?

20.	

	kivals <http://jmkivals.blogspot.com>  August 5th, 2008 3:16 pm 

	DaveEriqat,

	I think people have tried living with no government in charge
before, including in Afghanistan and various places in Africa in the last
few decades. It appears that without governments people inevitably come to
be ruled by armed gangs of thugs. 

	Democratic government is designed to give the majority of people
control over the society, authorizing one armed gang (the government), with
the people’s assent, power to inflict violence. The people not only are,
theoretically, in charge of enforcing the rules, but are also in charge of
making them, presumably for the common good. Though any society develops an
elite and any set of rules at least to some extent serves the elites of a
society, many rules in a democratic system are actually intended to, and do,
serve the common good. 

	No implementation of a democratic system is ideal, and the US
governmental system, as an early experiment in democratic government, is a
bit of a dinosaur, an outmoded and inefficient model. And after decades of
domination by elite business interests, it has been gamed and warped to the
point it bears little resemblance to what was intended. However, almost any
implementation would likely beat the alternative of rule by competing armed
gangs that leads to a Hobbesian world where life is “
 nasty, brutish, and
short.” 

	Eliminating government does not appear to be a very good answer.
Doing what is necessary to ensure that a government serves the public and
the common good to a greater extent than before makes much more sense.

21.	

	Grousefeather August 5th, 2008 3:21 pm 

	I’m a firm believer in free enterprise, but not capitalism. Free
enterprise exists when everybody who works hard has an equal chance for
business success, and success and enterprise is promoted and rewarded by
government. Capitalism, is when the free enterprize system is subverted
through the accumulation of vast amounts of capital and competition is
eventually snuffed out. Capitalism is a system with one basic rule: the big
fish eat the little fish. However, Democracy is a system of government which
was invented to keep the big fish out of the pond. 

	YES, to free enterprize!

	NO, to capitalism!

22.	

	Poet August 5th, 2008 4:29 pm 

	Kane Jeeves sez:

	“Excellent article, but doesn’t take the last step. As John Dean has
shown us, Conservatism is at its root all about authoritariansim and
domination.”

	*****************

	The book Conservatives Without Conscience” makes no such claims for
all conservatives or conservatism–It does document the corrupting influence
that coming to power in
Washington has had on a particular strain of conservatives–we’ll call them
the Bushies for short.

	Kane Jeeves continues:

	“What institution does *that* mindset spring from? Come on, it’s
that elephant of all elephants in the room
Old Testament Christianity. Until
we address the root of the problem conservatism will continue to rear its
ugly head.”

	***********************

	Blaming authoritarianism on Christianity makes as much sense as
blaming terrorist suicide bombings on Islam or the totalitarian attrocities
of Stalin, Mao, and Pol Pot on Marxism. There are authoritarian,
totalitarian, corrupt, domineering bullies of every stripe –including
Liberal (LBJ, Jim Wright, Tony Coehelo, Richard Daley to name just a few).

	*****************

	My own take on this book excerpt is that Frank attempts to show that
Conservatism by its nature is as inimcal to any kind of ethical or good
governance as pornography is to sexual restraint. 

	This actually raises the even more intriguing question of why the
American people would continue to elect people to govern them who despise
the very idea of public service and worship at the altar of self-enrichment.
(This was the original question posed in Frank’s “What’s the Matter
With Kansas?”)

	For Liberal-Progressives this next step is fraught with the painful
realization that the main reason the country would elect an amiable dunce
like Ronald Reagan whose mantra was “Government is not the solution to our
problems, government is the problem” was that the excesses of
Liberal/progressives in the Congress, Senate, and the White House for the
previous 40 years made such nonsense plausible and believable.

	That is a place we progressives are not willing to go because we
have not had that many new ideas on governance since LBJ’s Great Society
which was dismantled by the Vietnam war. This country’s sexist, racist,
blood-lust for war ethic has made such ideas as are prominent in
Scandanavian countries and Venezuela practically impossible to introduce in
the US at this time.

23.	

	RichM August 5th, 2008 4:37 pm 

	My answer to most of Dave Eriquat’s questions (1:59 pm) would be not
“government” per se, but rather the US government in particular. And of
course, to a lesser extent (& considering only the developed countries),
governments that are closest to the US government ideologically — most
notably the British, Australian & Israeli governments. The Scandinavian
governments, by contrast, aren’t guilty of remotely the same degree of
violence, crimes against humanity, tasering citizens, jailing & spying on
citizens, creating financial bubbles, etc. Canada, Switzerland & Holland are
also nowhere near the US, in terms of overall government viciousness. 

	Sure, sure, one can say that it’s easier for a government to be a
well-behaved global citizen if it doesn’t have that much power. Denmark (for
example) couldn’t really push other countries around too ferociously, even
if it wanted to. And no one claims that the Danish model of governance is
flawless. // On the other hand, it’s very hard to miss the basic pattern:
the more a country seeks to dominate either the whole world, like the US, or
its region (like Israel), the worse its behavior. And the more closely a
country ties its fortunes to serving the leading global predator (like the
UK or Australia), the worse its behavior.

24.	

	Jack37 <http://ancientgreece-earlyamerica.com>  August 5th, 2008
4:41 pm 

	Government has virtually always been a tool of American Empire—from
its proud policies of Native extermination onward. As if capitalism weren’t
bad enough—the proven enemy of human community everywhere. The BushCo years
were a deliberate attempt to undo the last New Deal parts of it, to make
government so intolerably stupid, incompetent and corrupt that people (they
hoped) would start crying for the simplicities of a dictator. There seems to
be no limit to the criminal charges that should be filed against Bush/Cheney
and the rest of them. And why isn’t Karl Rove in jail? Ask Barf Spritzer or
CNN!

25.	

	NMlib August 5th, 2008 4:44 pm 

	greenerthanthou said: And don’t forget the widespread practice of
fingerprinting, background checks and urine drug tests just to get a job in
the “land of the free”. 

	They’re proposing to do this now in our local school district, even
though we don’t have major problems with drugs (alcohol, on the other hand,
is an issue). One supporter even mentioned that the kids should get used to
it because many jobs require random drug testing, anyway.

26.	

	kivals <http://jmkivals.blogspot.com>  August 5th, 2008 4:55 pm 

	RichM,

	When the US government is acting in many other countries,
particularly weak and vulnerable countries, it appears to be accountable to
no one. “Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely,”
and when there is no accountability, there is a form of absolute power. The
US government becomes just another gang of armed thugs when it is
accountable to no one, and we can see the results.

27.	

	ncycat August 5th, 2008 5:15 pm 

	Dave makes it sound as though the government is some magical entity
from another dimension. “It” is us. We are It. The government is made up of
American citizens of all walks of life, who get their hands on money and
power and go wack-o. It doesn’t take much. If Bush were to impose martial
law, it wouldn’t be the “government,” that entity from Mars, pointing its
guns at us, it would be
our sons and brothers and fathers and husbands, good
American citizens, aiming at us.
If there is corruption at the highest levels, it also exists at the lowest.
And nothing will change until we recognize that and do the hard work to
change it.

28.	

	gus August 5th, 2008 5:23 pm 

	scottstlouis wrote:
“I’ve argued for a few years that Bush has been quite sucessful at
accomplishing everything he & Cheney set out to accomplish.”

	Absolutely correct. Anyone calling these guys dumbasses are a
dumbass themselves. Bush, Cheney, and their puppeteers are laughing their
asses off. Look what they’ve accomplished:
1. Engineered a tax cut that redirected $1.3 TRILLION to the upper 2% of
income earners in the US. In one stroke, they wipe out lower- and
middle-class Democrat consitutuencies.
2. Disrupted oil markets that put TRILLIONS more $$ in the pocket of their
oil buddy contributors and the Saudis.
3. Sold off our government to the highest bidders, leading to a dismantling
of regulatory protections such as the Clean Air and Clean Water Acts.

	Bush and Cheney are geniuses, and will escape untouched. The
American people and their “representatives” are the ignorant fools in this
equation.

29.	

	empirePie August 5th, 2008 6:25 pm 

	There seems to be quite a flux of powerful ideologies and
controlling interests each seeking their own bottom lines in an intricate
worldwide web of transactions that no one really understands.

	We do know though that the tragedy of the commons is being repeated
on larger and larger scales even though this result is not even in the long
term interests of many of the same primary actors and current benefactors on
the world stage.

	How can we isolate and deter the forces that profit from the overall
degradation of our space ship home?

	The Home of the Brave

	the eagle empire is on the skids
the eagle evil empire is up for bids

	the war payola plundering puppets know no bounds
like back room banker predator power pomp driven hounds
with chutzpah to the power of ten
are moving up the dooms day clock again
with a little help from faithful big (Bear bankie) Ben

	Sure they may throw us some bones as we loose our homes
while they buy summer Mc mansions with some shady loans

	oh the chutzpah oh the chutzpah of this corporate banker brass
who wipe their ass with us servile ants
while the land of milk and honey becomes
the land bilk and baloney

	the warrior whipped wussy class
have mortgaged the nation to the hilt
and are tilting windmills like a Vanderbuilt
while the levers on the levers won’t be able to check
the long drawn out impending financial wreck

	but heck

	we soon may be able to breath a sigh of relief
while the eagle empire looses it’s teeth

30.	

	GKL August 5th, 2008 6:29 pm 

	Conservatism and Libertarianism has latched on to Milton Freidman’s
ideas of marketplace economy. If the sole mission of corporations is to earn
profits for shareholders, then conscience and fair play are meaningless.
Corruption and bribery becomes a value in itself. Money becomes God.
Bush/Cheney are products of corporate ethics.
Milton Freidman is dead. We don’t have to listen to him anymore.

31.	

	RichM August 5th, 2008 6:34 pm 

	kivals (4:55 pm ) - No argument from me on that!  ;)
<http://www.commondreams.org/archive/wp-includes/images/smilies/icon_wink.gi
f> 

32.	

	david.peace2002 August 5th, 2008 6:36 pm 

	Could part of the problem be that the US has gotten too big? We have
military bases all over the world and in every community here. Yet for some
reason, that government that We, the People, elect time after time, keeps
telling us that we aren’t safe. We are told by us, the government, that
various substances are harmful and yet we, the People, through those same
elected representatives that we send back every time, even when we know
they’re corrupt, give the corporations that produce these substances money
to continue producing them. We know that the world has some very serious
problems and we know how to solve them. But we won’t, because, come
November, we will send the same lunatics back to lap of luxury that is paid,
elected office who will pretend to argue and bicker amongst themselves in
public and get nothing done, ever. Behind closed doors they must laughing
their asses off at the incredible stupidity of the American people because
we simple refuse to learn. Gullibility can only be used as an excuse for so
long until it must be obvious that we can’t be gullible, we must, instead,
be rather dumb. Why else can’t we seem to get real change, improvement, in
our daily lives despite supposedly having the freest society on the planet?
So the solution may be that we have become too big. Does that mean that
instead of one big, dumb society it would be better to have a lot of small
dumb societies? I think so, at least it would be easier for the smarter
societies, governments, those that actually respond to the will of their
people to successfully rattle our cage and smack some sense into us.

	“Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens
can change the world. Indeed, it’s the only thing that ever has.”

	That’s what we need. Smaller groups.

33.	

	merryoldsoul August 5th, 2008 7:05 pm 

	when does the hanging start?

	When do we start loading our guns?\and when do the poor and middle
class
realize the smokescreen of moral positioning has set the stage for massive
robbery of our treasury and our childrens future
THE COMMON GOOD—sounds like liberation theology to me, and what about the
revolution of 76,,,1776 all for naught???? WAKE UP —The British are coming,
and came and went, and took the true revolution with them and left the
corporations that Hamilton and Jefferson warned us about

34.	

	doodledoo August 5th, 2008 7:16 pm 

	Grousefeather August 5th, 2008 3:21 pm wrote:

	YES, to free enterprize!

	NO, to capitalism!

	——

	This sounds interesting. Does this system where free (non-military?)
enterprise is rewarded by government have a name?

35.	

	wilmoor August 5th, 2008 7:21 pm 

	For over fifteen years I’ve studied the people of the two political
parties, noted such a difference in everything about them. There’s the
conservatives, all dressed in clothes that fit just right, and always hang
perfectly, never rumpling, regardless of how long the day is. Their hair
always in place, looking like they just got out of the hair dresser’s chair,
and they never smile or look flustered.

	Then the democrats - just the opposite. Suits (except those of the
long-timers) look rumpled, stick up behind the shoulders, or just don’t fit:
hair every-which-way; looking frazzled at day’s end, and subject to goofey
grins. Of course the suits could be a sign of no back bone.

	And then there’s a whole lot who aren’t like either of these groups.

	I recently re-read the books SARUM and LONDON by Edward Rutherfurd,
and I swore I could see conservatives and liberals in the earliest citizens
in England. I’m wondering if the Roman league brought the conservatism.

	I’ve wished I could do a real study on conservatism and liberalism.
Since I’m too old and half blind, it’s beyond me. But I sure would like to
see someone do it.

	And I don’t believe all the education or reasoning would change
anyone in either party, unless they weren’t really of that persuasion to
begin with.

36.	

	Shiva August 5th, 2008 7:42 pm 

	talk talk talk - where are the thugs hanging from every tree and
lamp post. talk talk talk as you die as you are intended to by the thugs for
their profit

37.	

	kahalab August 5th, 2008 7:46 pm 

	It’s not the corporations, it’s the sociopaths and psychopaths that
own the corporations and the governments of the world. They would push the
world back to feudalism if they could making all of us serfs without any
rights and themselves kings and queens with absolute power.

38.	

	shakker August 5th, 2008 7:52 pm 

	Bu$h the inferior and Shotgun Dick are stupid in that they have
assembled the worst administration ever. They will be infamous and hated by
most of the world for the rest of their lives. Chaney is said to be paranoid
about security. He fears being attacked, good, he deserves it, he has worked
hard to be this evil. Throughout the rest of recorded history these guys
will be remembered as scum if they are remembered at all. 

	These are extraordinarily rich people who could have done anything
they pleased. They chose to do this!

	Now that is stupid and incompetent, but not in a way these guys
understand.

39.	

	Siouxrose August 5th, 2008 8:45 pm 

	GUS: I do not agree that Bush/Cheney are geniuses. If you don’t give
a rat’s ass about another human being, a pesky thing like morals get in the
way of that abject climb to the top of the rubble. There was a wish list of
sorts among Republican/conservatives, and when they HAD the congress, the
press, and the Supreme Court, all it took was claiming the election. Then
they were free to institute through all those “brilliant” (loyal sycophants)
lawyers a trumped up version of a unitary executive “theory,” (= king) along
with torture being called OTHER and by many loyal followers, taken as thus.
In other words, like a Broadway Stage play, the SET was ready, all it took
was two calamitously callous players to implement a plot long devised and
being orchestrated by LOTS of monied players.

40.	

	Siouxrose August 5th, 2008 8:52 pm 

	WILMOOR: My apologies to any who find me redundant, but I believe
the Zodiac arrangement of PLANNED human archetypes, 12 to be exact,
corelates with Jesus specifically choosing that number of disciples, also
the number of tribes allegedly founded by Abraham.

	Among these 12 is a persona that is much like the dour god that
holds the hourglass, Cronus (Chronos). Richard Nixon was that embodiment,
and it can lean towards paranoia. To offset fear, that energy seeks to
control everything and everyone around it. Hence this personality type does
very well with rules and tends to be conservative. Not every Capricorn
manifests these traits, but it does represent the template for that sign. 

	So the Saturn-Chronos persona acts as that personality that will
hold onto traditions at all costs, and it’s leveraged against its antithesis
Uranus (which rules Aquarius) and is the Zodiac’s rule breaker. Reagan was
Aquarius by sign, but acted far more like a Capricorn, although he WAS open
to astrology, something that many Aquarians recognize constitutes a
meta-logic system. Jupiter is the principle that can be easily linked to the
New Testament and very concepts of faith, and positive thinking

particularly when it bears prosperous results.

	These are 3 chief outer planets, each mandated to project specific
energies which on some level link with our own birth blueprints, or inner
coding. Women are clocked to the moon, the menstrual cycle is usually 29
days as is the lunar cycle. We age in relation to the earth’s orbit around
the sun. Anyone can argue that these forces have no bearing on them, but in
my view that’s like arguing against gravity. How much free will we have
versus how much our lives are predestined is something that can only be
debated. 

	I think of fate and free will as polar forces that give rise to a
3rd element by virtue of the ongoing dance represented between them. This
reminds me of the way Jesus spoke of the Holy spirit or trinity. Some might
call that tertiary force change, chance, mutation or grace; but just as
mutation occurs in evolution, and permutation in math, not every variable
can be consigned to fate OR free will. There is the mystery, and that’s why
even in this forum when all the data (so often so mortifyingly negative) is
before us, we must realize that there is always that THIRD force. (Hmm
 not
a bad name for a sci-fi novel.)


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