With great interest I have watched this whole debt ceiling debacle unfold. Were it not so sad it would actually be funny or at least satirical. All the hype around each of the four Congressional leaders and who they would select, then the naming and all the hype again and now reality begins to set in; yes, the lobbyist hold on these twelve people!
One thing Obama has done, which also has quieted, is circumvent the electoral process with the naming of the Czars; heard of any czardom success stories lately? But then, I go to bed early so perhaps I missed some of them. If you know of any please email me!
I would love to go down the pathway of jabbing at the Debt Busters and the farce this will be as they come back to session with at Thanksgiving deadline and all the triggers and, and, and but I am choosing to go down a different and, for me a much more troubling and concerning reality in this nation. There will be some that will read this that will not agree due to close connections to this pathway but the cash process of electing Constitutional officers in the Executive and Legislative branches is simply wrong! When I see year after year that the real metric of how well the campaigns are going, or not, is in the amount of money being committed, I literally feel my skin crawling and you should also.
Then, for me, the real lice in the pudding is the lobbying industry that spread their tentacles in all directions with monies from an array of sources to beholden the politician to their causes and ends. Now, this is nothing new for Lincoln wrote much about this prostitutional process for how can you call it anything else as I view it! The "Debt Busters" are not the target, and rightly so, of the national media as they exam the lobbyist stranglehold on these twelve people charged with reducing our Fed spending by$1,500,000,000 with the first thrust before Turkey Day. What does that mean? It means these twelve, whose recommendations cannot be overturned nor amended by either House of Congress, has to decide which pig to push from the trough; you know, those same big pigs that put these people in the offices to begin with and pay to keep them there IF they do their beckoning! Feeling better yet?
There is at the very core of our democratic system a cancer that eats away a little more each day our Constitutionally assured freedoms. Read that Preamble again! Read the whole Constitution again assuming you have read either at all! I am so serious about this that as my new semester readies for launch at Kent State, I am seriously thinking about making my students read the US Constitution as a mandatory Block of Work in a a Principles of Management class for I think it that important for leaders of tomorrow to understand the very foundations upon which this nation resides.
It is my strong belief that until the lobbyist process is killed completely there will never be a clean, undiminished electoral process. So while I wish the Debt Busters well, you can KNOW, BILLIONS of dollars are working through the system to "help" these twelve make the "right" decisions for billions more are working at the state levels as well. I think the dichotomy for me is that we have millions of poor people on food stamps, entitlement programs, budgets being cut, layoffs the norm. Then you realize the mountain of money going in strange, below the radar paths to get and keep politicians in office; am I crazy doesn't it seem ludicrous when you view it at the macro level?
As an American citizen, I have always detested the lobbying system. When you realize the number of politician that finally get unelected or "retire" and find their way into these same K Street Lobby Houses of Disrepute, you have to wonder, hummm, must be a pretty good gig, right? Clean up the lobbyist you clean up the election system. You clean up the election system you get better, cleaner Constitution-enforcing Executives and Legislators. To me, realizing I am from Alabama and thus have to understand things at a more simple level I suppose, it is really pretty simple. But NOBODY in Washington nor the state capitols nor counties nor cities will for it takes guts! You have heard me ask many times, Where are the leaders? Well the real question is where are the leaders with the guts to take this system head on?
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