Rick Burns for Maine State Senate District 2

Broken Government & The Political Divide

Posted on 03-19-10 by rick

”Government is broken!” A cry of ever-greater volume and frequency in today’s America. It is difficult for the average American paying attention to what’s going on in the world around us to deny this cry .
 
Government is a reflection of the will of the people. The will of the people is shaped by a mass media, particularly the news media. Some allege that this news-media is conservative. Others accuse it of a liberal bias. The one certain thing about the media – it is corporate. Being corporate doesn’t make the media inherently bad. It just means that as a corporation it has a fiduciary obligation to someone. By law, the corporation must concern itself first and foremost with the interests of investors. The corporate media is a business in search of profits. Again, there is nothing wrong with this; we just have to understand that a corporate media is a medium interested in money. 

This is not to say that we have no problems with the corporate media. We do! We have a problem with it because is has become a monopolist behemoth that virtually controls the distribution of information and thus shapes the way the public thinks about and reacts to the world around them. They say jump and we jump.
 
It is no surprise that we jump for the media. We are a society founded upon the principle of free speech. We value the process of thinking. We especially value the process whereby we share those thoughts with each other. We’re a nation established in the realm of deep thought and we’re proud of it. There used to be a barrier between news content and money. The flow of ideas were covered by the press without concern for sources of revenue.  
 
The mechanisms used to distribute the wealth of our ideas used to be widespread and independent. Towns and cities once had their own newspapers, radio and television stations. Today these vehicles for disseminating information are conglomerates, owned by multinational corporations. Once they were family businesses. Now they are publicly trade enterprises or wholely owned by powerful elites.
 
So, government is broken and so too is our state and nation. We cannot speak of the health of our state without consideration for the health of our nation. What ails Maine ails the other states as well.
 
We are just one part of a greater whole to which we “pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America and to the republic for which it stands, one nation under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.”
 
We are led to believe that our troubles are with each other. We have neighbor pitted against neighbor, town against town, state against state. We’re led into a fierce competition against ourselves in a race to the land of no promise while those that lead us there make enormous gains at our expense.
 

Americans are losing their homes. One third of all homeless Americans are veterans. Americans still holding on to their homes have no access to healthcare. College student find no jobs commensurate with their expensive educations. Our elderly still struggle between putting food on the table and buying pharmaceuticals to maintain their health. We can no longer afford the public sector – teachers, law enforcement, fire & rescue, as the private sector upon which these are funded have been shipped off to foreign lands to avoid paying Americans wages that support families and family values.
The problem at the root of all this pain is attributable, in part, to the media characterized above. However, greedy global trade agreements crafted behind closed doors causing the loss of our industrial base compounds the problem. It can fairly be said that what ails us, as a nation is more by design than by accident.

The solution – we all must return home from the battlefield of political divide. There are more Independent voters in Maine and America than there are Democrats and Republicans combined. Party politics has proven to be everything our founders feared – a force that would ultimately divide us as a nation and permit us to be conquered by powers at odds with who we are as a nation.
 
Political parties did not exist at the birth of our nation. President George Washington frowned on the idea suggesting a nation shaped by factions would pit one group of citizens against another. How could he be so right? The people have a right to establish government, Washington believed, and political parties are “destructive” to this end, he argued in his farewell speech of 1796.
 
Political parties “serve to organize faction, to give it an artificial and extraordinary force; to put, in the place of the delegated will of the nation, the will of a party, often a small but artful and enterprising minority of the community; and, according to the alternate triumphs of different parties, to make the public administration the mirror of the ill-concerted and incongruous projects of faction, rather than the organ of consistent and wholesome plans digested by common counsels, and modified by mutual interests.” 

A two-party political monopoly has reduced America to ping-pong-politics. We bounce our problems back-and-forth between the two as though they had an interest in solving the nations problems.

It’s time we look at each other as Americans and not as D’s and R’s, Liberals and Conservatives, red states and blue states. We are Americans before we are anything else. When we permit ourselves to be so divided, we stop being who we are as a nation.
 
When we pledge allegiance to the flag, we do much more than pledge an allegiance to a piece of cloth with symbolic colors. We pledge an allegiance to each other. We make a promise to each other that we will work together for a common cause, an American Dream.
 

Abraham Lincoln, in a letter to one of his officers on the battlefield said, “I see in the near future a crisis approaching that unnerves me and causes me to tremble for the safety of my country. Corporations have been enthroned, an era of corruption in high places will follow, and the money-power of the country will endeavor to prolong it’s reign by working upon the prejudices of the people until the wealth is aggregated in a few hands and the Republic is destroyed.”

I’m not sure what Lincoln meant by “the prejudices of the people,” but Webster defines prejudice as an unfavorable opinion or feeling formed beforehand or without knowledge, thought, or reason.”

Being a resident of Maine I must admit that my knowledge of Maine is based on real life experience and observation. My knowledge of people and places far off is dependent upon the corporate media. If I form an unfavorable opinion of someone or someplace based on the spoon-fed media concoction I must ask myself if I’m acting with “liberty and justice for all,” or on some prejudice shaped by the media and played upon by some special interest.

This leads me to the last point I want to make. What do we mean when we refer to “people,” particularly in the context of “We, The People?” and what do we mean when we speak of “national interest?”

Clearly when my neighbor talks about people, she’s talking about real, live, breathing people. Based on the recent United States Supreme Court Decision Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission corporations are people too. They have the same free-speech rights as individuals. In fact, corporations have all the rights that real people have and are entitled to all the constitutional protections offered to living Americans. The fact that they are often multinational corporations with mostly unlimited resources is irrelevant. The fact that they live an eternity rather than a mortal lifetime is unimportant.  Clarence Page of the Chicago Tribune points out that,

“…The Constitution did not mention corporations… The Framers left it to the states to create corporations through charters and rules that varied by state. Anyone who put a corporation out of business could be accused of many things, but murder was not one of them.”

What does this mean? It means that a judge, legislating from the bench, made a decision that a corporation, a piece of property created by men – not God – has the same rights as you and I. Does this make sense? To some, yes. To most, not at all! If you’re a corporate lawyer, paid by corporate interests, it makes lots of sense – dollars & cents.

According to Page,” The 1886 case of Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad Company is often cited as the beginning of “corporate personhood” under the law. Yet this personhood comes ambiguously, not in the body of the decision but in something that Chief Justice Morrison R. Waite was quoted in the decision’s legal summary as having said before oral arguments began.”

“The court does not wish to hear argument on the question whether the provision in the fourteenth amendment to the Constitution, which forbids a State to deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws, applies to these corporations. We are all of the opinion that it does,” according to the headnote of the court reporter.

“As a result,” Page says, “the court appears to have ruled on the equal-protection issue without ever weighing it through any argument, deliberation or formal opinions. Thin as this legal reed may be, generations of lawyers have clung to it in arguing for an expanding galaxy of corporate rights.”

It should be clear to us by now that corporate people have more access to the media than do real, living Americans. It should also be clear that corporations have more access to the courts, the third branch of government, than do real, living Americans.

Lincoln was no stranger to the forces that divide a nation. Neither was he a stranger to the practice of global trade and economics. In his day we were torn much the way we are today. At least then, Lincoln and the nation had the clarity of mind to know that union and community was the path to our salvation and a “house divided against itself can not stand.”

The Civil War has come to define the Lincoln administration but he was more than that war. Lincoln understood commerce. Not only was the transcontinental railroad built during his administration but it gave birth to the American steel Industry, which gave birth to a locomotive and freight car industry followed by a passenger train industry. In fact, there is no industry in America that doesn’t have at least one set of rails leading to and from its place of business; raw materials in and finished product out and all spawned by the rails laid across this nation with taxpayer dollars and from the pen of Abraham Lincoln.

The untold story of the Lincoln administration lies in his insistence that the rails be bought and paid for here, in America, rather than the leading supplier of steel at the time – Great Britain. Industrialist wanted rails and they wanted them fast. The United States had an emerging Steel Industry capable of meeting the demand but lacking the sophistication of the Brits.

Lincoln’s position, “We can buy from the Brits. We can have our steel and they can have our money… Or, we can buy from Americans and have both the steel and the money.”

If Lincoln lived longer, it is my guess that corporate power would have taken a back seat to the power of the people. Corporate media would not be a part of our lexicon and government would reflect your will and advance your interests rather than tending to the needs and interests of Wall Street banks and insurance companies!

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