US political system - a view from abroad by Magonsdaughter

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US political system - a view from abroad

POSTED BY: MAGONSDAUGHTER
UPDATED: Sunday, January 15, 2012 13:41
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Friday, January 13, 2012 3:23 PM

Thought some of you might find this article interesting.

This Republican abuse of the system is not the American way

The centuries-old US political system is one to be admired. Yet ironically it's under threat from those who claim to be patriots.

They say one in four of the world's people will have a vote in an election in 2012, but no contest will get more attention than the presidential one in the US – if only for its entertainment value. So far the Republican primary has spoiled us, from Rick Perry's "oops" to corporate asset-stripper Mitt Romney's admission that he liked firing people, delivered just before he was snapped receiving a sit-down shoe-shine from an underling – not a good look for a would-be man of the people. En route we've had Rick Santorum insisting that he does not equate homosexuality with bestiality – or, as he memorably phrased it, "man on dog" – and that when he had appeared to make a disobliging reference to black people, he had in fact been speaking of "blah" people.

All amusing enough in its own way, but no match for this time four years ago, when the race between Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton captured a rapt and global audience. The 2008 contest and its result achieved a remarkable turnaround in the US's standing overseas. The Pew survey found that while just over 50% of Britons, for example, had a favourable view of the US in the final Bush years, the figure had leapt close to 70% by the time Obama was in the White House.

Yet now the numbers are slipping again. I have my own unscientific indicator to go on too. A few years back I published a book calling for Britain to learn from America's founding ideal, to reshape our own creaking political machinery on the lines of the US constitution, with its separation of powers and guaranteed rights. Soon after publication, events conspired to make the US a hard sell. Whether it was the Monica Lewinsky-related impeachment of Bill Clinton, the Florida fiasco in which Al Gore seemed to lose an election he'd won or the entire Bush presidency, I was regularly confronted with the original subtitle of my book – How Britain Can Live the American Dream – and mockingly asked, "It's all looking like a bit of a nightmare now, isn't it?".

I'm hearing that again, as non-Americans watch not just the bizarre Republican presidential field but the paralysis of a US political system that has rendered an elected president apparently incapable of doing almost anything. The final straw came last August, when the US saw its credit rating downgraded after coming close to a default – all because Congress refused to raise the country's debt ceiling. Surely now, people wondered, I had given up my youthful enthusiasm for a set-up that could result in such madness?

Well, no, I haven't. I still admire a system in which election is the usual method for allocating public positions, including the head of state; whose second chamber is elected rather than appointed; which ensures serious power exists at local, town hall level; which locates sovereignty in the people rather than in an abstraction, such as our "crown in parliament"; and which sets down the rules and rights of national life in a written constitution that serves as a kind of owner's manual available to every citizen. All that I still admire.

But I confess the constipation embodied by the US Congress, the constant gridlock, has made me despair. A check on the executive is one thing; a triple-locked pair of handcuffs on the president's wrists, restraining him and his party from even, say, extending unemployment benefits to the needy, is quite different.

And yet this is not some inherent flaw in the US system, an outcome logically entailed by the founders' design and therefore unavoidable. On the contrary, it is the result of an abuse of the system, a consequence specifically of the march rightward of the Republican party.

Take the debt ceiling row. Congress never used to have a problem with that: the vote to raise the limit was always routine, nodded through 87 times since 1945, no matter which party was in charge. But today's Republicans seized on the chance to put a gun to the head of the US economy. Either the president caved to their demands or they were ready to see the country default. No wonder the credit agency Standard & Poor's declared as it took away America's triple-A rating that "the effectiveness, stability, and predictability of American policymaking and political institutions have weakened".

To be sure, that ability to hold the country to ransom was always there, buried within the rulebook. But convention and a shared assumption that no party would act blatantly against the national interest ensured those potential weapons lay dormant. Starting in the 1990s, under then-speaker Newt Gingrich, the Republicans cast aside those conventions, dismissing them as the cosy practices of Washington insiders, an offence against ideological purity. More important now is their Tea Party pledge to vote against any tax rise or new borrowing, no matter how damaging the impact.

So they threaten filibuster against any important Democratic measure and every presidential appointment, a trick that can only be foiled with 60 out of 100 Senate votes. That way the Republican minority exercises a veto over the Democratic majority, even if the result is paralysis in the face of economic crisis and hundreds of crucial government posts left empty. Again, the possibility of minority rule may have been there before. But it has taken the shift in today's Republican mindset to realise it.

And what is that shift? It is towards an anti-government fervour that recalls the militia movement of the 1990s, convinced that every Washington move – even a plan to expand healthcare – is motivated by wickedness and constitutes a step towards tyranny. In that context, any action to thwart the government beast is justified. Such ideas were always around on the lunatic fringe, but they have entered and now dominate the Republican mainstream. Today's presidential candidates must bow to them. In the words of Mike Lofgren, a Republican congressional staffer who recently quit after nearly 30 years' service, today's Republicans are less like a traditional political party and "more like an apocalyptic cult".

There is a bitter irony here, that the party that insists it is conservative and patriotic now threatens the centuries-old political system that lies at the core of the US's national identity. The ideal remains true, but it is being warped almost to breaking point by the very people who claim to be its loudest defenders.

From the Guardian

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Friday, January 13, 2012 3:35 PM

AURAPTOR

America loves a winner!

I stopped reading at the point of Romney's non gaff on firing people.

Pointless tripe and idiocy is to follow if they refuse to honestly report what he really said.

Not worth my time.

" I do not love the bright sword for its sharpness, nor the arrow for its swiftness, nor the warrior for his glory. I love only that which they defend. "

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Friday, January 13, 2012 4:25 PM

DREAMTROVE

I suspect the democratic party, though I sometimes work for it, is just as corrupt, dysfunctional and powerhungry as the republican party. I don't see a lot of difference there. I also don't see Obama's healthcare plan as that much different than Bush's, both represented the abuse of a popular agenda to hand money and power to their friends.

The govt. *is* evil. It's evil because it's filled with evil people, and it is filled with evil people because it has power they can abuse, so they have a reason to gravitate towards it. Therefore everything it does is cursed with the underhanded agendas of the people in it. This is why healthcare reform is not a blessing, and why no debt crisis financial management change is going to make the system more fair.

I don't see any reason why the simple human mechanics that draw the wicked to power are going to be at all altered by the color of tie the people are wearing when they go.

That's what a ship is, you know - it's not just a keel and a hull and a deck and sails, that's what a ship needs.

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Friday, January 13, 2012 4:30 PM

MAGONSDAUGHTER

And another one.

Silence like a cancer grows
ANNE SUMMERS
January 14, 2012

Opinion

"Every day people are just walking away from their homes."

"Every day people are just walking away from their homes." Illustration: Rocco Fazzari

If American politics in 2012 had a soundtrack it would have to be The Sound of Silence, the evocative song written by Paul Simon after the assassination of President John F. Kennedy in 1963.

''People talking without speaking, people hearing without listening,'' Simon sang. That's exactly what it's like in America at present: what needs to be talked about is being ignored in favour of endless babble about irrelevancies. The sound of silence in America today is the conservative ideology that ignores economic realities while it lays down an atavistic social agenda.

This is true on the campaign trail, where the men who want to be president rail against contraception, abortion and gay marriage and other non-emergencies but have no credible proposals for how to deal with the economic catastrophe that has befallen their country.
Advertisement: Story continues below

A similar silence was evident last Sunday in Tucson, Arizona, when the city marked the first anniversary of the massacre in the car park outside a suburban Safeway supermarket in which six people were killed, among them a Federal Court judge and a nine-year-old girl, and 14 injured, including Representative Gabrielle Giffords who suffered critical but, miraculously, not fatal head wounds.

A few days before the anniversary, I visited the Safeway car park and looked in vain for a plaque or other marker of what occurred that day. As we drove out of the car park, however, we noticed that across from the exit, on the other side of the road, were six makeshift wooden crosses, like those that relatives place on highways to mark road accident deaths.

Not much of a memorial, I'd thought. It was as if the supermarket was trying to avoid contamination from the carnage. But a few days later, on the actual anniversary, a small bronze plaque set in granite appeared near the front door of Safeway. ''Honouring the victims of the event of January 8, 2011,'' it said. ''The Tucson Tragedy - We shall never forget. Safeways.''

The ''event'' was not described. You would never know that 20 people were felled in six seconds as a result of the 31 rounds fired by Jared Lee Loughner, a 22-year-old local who had gone to the ''Congress on your Corner'', a meeting with constituents organised by Giffords, with the express intention of killing her. Or that even more people could have been shot were it not for the courageous action of tiny 61-year-old Patricia Maisch, who wrestled the new magazine from Loughner when he stopped to reload.

The anniversary of the first-ever assassination attempt on a member of Congress was commemorated, far away from the site of the crime, by the city's bells pealing at the exact time of the shooting, an inter-faith service, and a candlelit vigil at the university. There was no political message calling for gun control. The sound of silence.

Last year a few eyebrows were raised when, the week after the shooting, the annual ''Crossroads of the West Gun Show'' had gone ahead, although flags were flown at half-mast as, Reuters reported, ''thousands of shoppers browsed for guns''. A stallholder was reported as saying, ''People see it as either guns are going to get banned, or I'm going to get shot. Either way, it drives sales.''

This year's show was on the actual anniversary, and again thousands flocked to the Pima County Fairgrounds to sample the lethal wares. On January 12 last year, at a memorial service for the victims, President Barack Obama spoke of wanting to start ''a conversation'' on gun safety. The National Rifle Association seized on this to alert Americans to arm themselves before a likely Obama ban on guns.

As a result Americans went on a gun-buying spree. The FBI fielded 16.5 million queries last year from firearms sellers checking customers did not have criminal records. Loughner's purchase of a Glock 19 semi-automatic pistol from a local gun store was not queried because Arizona law does not require background checks on people over 21. During the Clinton administration the sale of semi-automatics such as the Glock 19 was illegal, but the legislation lapsed in 2004 and President George W. Bush did not renew it. Nor has Obama.

An even greater silence has descended over America's housing crisis. According to the Federal Reserve, one in four American mortgage holders are ''under water'', owing more than their homes are worth and, because of their negative equity, unable to refinance to take advantage of historically low interest rates. As a result, millions of owners are channelling so much of their income into their mortgages, often paying as much as 7 per cent (when a current mortgage can be obtained for 3.9 per cent), that they have little discretionary income to spend on clothes, food and other economic activity-generating items.

Last week the Federal Reserve took the highly unusual step of releasing to Congress a white paper on the housing crisis. ''Restoring the health of the housing market is a necessary part of a broader strategy for economic recovery,'' its chairman, Ben Bernanke, wrote in a covering letter. His frustration was palpable as he outlined the obstacles to recovery. Foremost among these are the efforts of mortgage lenders to minimise short-term losses, mainly by foreclosing on delinquent mortgages. Banks and Wall Street foreclosed on 3 million homes in 2010 and a further 7 million homes are at risk.

You can't visit Tucson without becoming painfully aware of the economic and human costs of this unravelling crisis. Arizona and neighbouring Nevada have the highest foreclosure rates in the nation. The local press reported recently that one in every 54 ''housing units'' in Tucson had received a foreclosure notice. House prices have declined by as much as 50 per cent and every day people are just walking away from their homes.

On the day after Christmas I visited La Encantada Mall, Tucson's ritziest shopping haven, about six kilometres from the Safeway where the massacre occurred last January and home to luxury stores such as Tiffany and Louis Vuitton. The place was packed, the car park was overflowing and sales were brisk.

Across town, at the recently opened Irvington Mall, home to lower-scale retailers such as Sears and JC Penney, trade was slow, the car park almost empty. Two days later, Sears announced it was closing 120 of its stores because of poor holiday trading. There could be no starker example of the financial travails of the 99 per cent. (And, yes, there is an Occupy Tucson, a small bunch of mostly young people camped in a park downtown.)

If you are following the Republican primary process, you'd be hard pressed to know this crisis existed. And any chance this might change as the campaigns move to ''foreclosureville'' states seems unlikely after the frontrunner Mitt Romney told the Las Vegas Review back in October: ''Don't try to stop the foreclosure process. Let it run its course and hit the bottom.'' In 2011, one in every 16 homes in Nevada was subject to foreclosure action. Will Romney repeat these views during the Nevada caucus on February 4?

The Fed is frustrated it does not have the powers to lessen the financial distress of the 7 million Americans threatened with foreclosure. It has resorted to pleading with Congress to undertake the following remedies: (1) set up a large-scale principal reduction initiative, (2) measures to help underwater homeowners refinance at lower rates, (3) convert vacant government-owned foreclosed homes to rental properties (to prevent further erosion of house prices by flooding an already crowded market), and (4) establish fair consumer protections for distressed home owners.

Currently, investors and mortgage servicers' interests are protected, while consumers' are not. And there is political pressure to keep it this way. Almost a quarter of the $32 million Romney has raised in direct donations to date has come from the finance, insurance and real estate sector, according to the Centre for Responsive Politics, which tracks all donations. His top five donors were all from Wall Street.

''I stand ready to lead us down a different path where we're lifted up by our desire to succeed, not dragged down by a resentment of success,'' Romney declared last Tuesday. He has not explained what this means in a tanking economy where even the good news is bad. Talking without speaking.

Last month's 200,000 new jobs sounds good only if you ignore the facts, wrote Paul Krugman in The New York Times on January 6. There are currently 6 million fewer jobs than at the end of 2007 and, given that 5 million jobs would normally be added over a four-year period, ''we're 11 million jobs down''. Jobs need to grow by at least 100,000 a month just to keep up with working-age population growth, he says. ''Do the math and you'll see that it would take nine or 10 years of growth at this rate to restore full employment.''

He doesn't think it's going to happen. Nor does Ben Bernanke. On the campaign trail you won't hear this kind of economic logic. Nothing disturbs the sound of silence.

Read more: http://www.theage.com.au/opinion/politics/silence-like-a-cancer-grows-
20120113-1pzdt.html#ixzz1jObKymoO

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Sunday, January 15, 2012 7:20 AM

NIKI2

Gettin' old, but still a hippie at heart...

Well said/written on both counts, Magons, thank you. I found both articles illustrative of what I already believe; that it's how the world is seeing us, while both laughing and shaking their heads, and that they're right to. It's absurd as hell that these things happened, and we deserve all the ridicule the world can shower on us. We've lost our way as a country, and tho' the deafening sound of silence has been replaced by louder outrage in recent times, it hasn't had any more effect. We've lost our way as a nation, and our famous "Founding Fathers" would be disgusted, if they saw us now.

If anyone is looking for the "demands" of OWS, here they are:

1. Get the money out of politics.
2. Get the money out of politics.
3. Get the money out of politics.

That would be a start, at least!

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Sunday, January 15, 2012 11:47 AM

MAGONSDAUGHTER

I don't think either author was laughing or shaking their heads. There is a kind of despair that the US system is in such a mess.

Like the first author, I've always found a lot to admire and aspire to in your system - love the idea of the kind of Constituion you have, brilliant ideas.

I've been posting on the net for about 7 years, mainly with Americans. It has given me a bit of insight and understanding that I never had before - probably distorted because the majority have been with Firefly fans - lol.

I find the pessimism confronting, not what I had expected, and certainly worse in the last few years now the rah rah of the Iraq war debates is over and the righteous fury of some has dissapated.

Mainly I see a lot of inward thinking. Not wanting to look outside the US, not caring much about what happens beyond the borders.

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Sunday, January 15, 2012 1:17 PM

FREMDFIRMA

The silence comes of a lack of access to confront the mainstream media propaganda engine - and maybe if the folks who write stuff like this would stop relying on it as a sole source they'd hear more of the outrage than they ever wanted to, which is prolly why they don't.

Speakin of Romney though, does he really think funnelling the hellcamp money through Credit Suisse Group is gonna fool anybody ?

Not to mention...

Goldman Sachs $367,200
Morgan Stanley $199,800
HIG Capital $186,500
Bank of America $126,500
JPMorgan Chase & Co $112,250
Bain Capital $74,500
Citigroup Inc $57,050

And that's just reported-direct, not slush or PAC money.

Romney's a punk - also his relationship with Bain Capital is one of them skeletons, too.

-Frem

I do not serve the Blind God.

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Sunday, January 15, 2012 1:41 PM

MAGONSDAUGHTER

To be fair to the author, the silence referred to the issues the campaigns and mainstream media have failed to focus on, ie sounds like the big, hard ones.

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