Society and the people

The people are no fools. Forty-eight percent of Americans — close to half of the population — feels that the best way to help the economy is to end the war in Iraq.

This logic, so far ignored on the campaign trail, is the only logic in the public discourse with any grounding in reason. For it is reasonable to believe that by ending the war in Iraq, hundreds of billions of dollars can be diverted to the public welfare, and not towards perpetuating the destruction of another country.

In the meantime, the federal government proceeds with a charade that $600 to every American is going to cause meaningful change in the economy. It will not. What the government is basically doing is printing money for people to spend — a root cause of inflation. This, combined with the continuing lowering of interest rates and general spending on the war, is creating a time-bomb of runaway inflation. This won’t happen overnight, but we’ll likely see the effects of this in the next quarter, e.g. by the summertime. Food prices will have increased, oil probably as well. Keep track of the price of milk and bread — you will no doubt be paying more for them soon.

By the summertime, it will be impossible to hide the poor management of the federal government over the economic health of the nation.

I want to explain this in easy terms so that people understand. We need to separate society from government. One is a beneficial union amongst the people for the betterment of the nation; the other is, at best, a necessity; and at worst, a grave imposition towards the national well-being.

Society knows what to do. Society is aware that we are heading towards a cliff, that the war must end, that the economy must be fixed or else things will get much worse.

Instead, the response of government is to aggravate social problems. Why would government do this? Because government is no longer responsive to the will of the people. Government has been hi-jacked by special interests — the military industrial complex, the insurance companies and the bankers — and now serves their needs, and not the needs of the people.

Government speaks of providing immunity to telecom companies like AT&T and Verizon who broke the law and spied on private citizens. Government speaks of bailing out the crooked banks who sold mortgages to millions of people now unable to pay them. Government insists that it must continue its “war on terror”, conveniently signing military contracts that provide billions of dollars ($282 billion since October 2006 alone) in revenue to military contractors and their supplicants. This is what government does.

I do not believe that Obama will be the savior of the nation. His policies, unlike those of Mssrs. Kucinich and Paul (ignored by the mainstream press) do not appear grounded in principle. Hope is a wonderful thing, but where is the promise to end the war? To tackle the root causes of America’s problems? Perhaps in his mind he sees these things, but if he cannot stand up to the insurance companies, the bankers, and the military industrial complex in public, then we still have a problem. Government is so entrenched in the mess it has made that it cannot even fathom how to clean it up.

No, the answers must come from society. Society, at its worst, is lazy, unable to stand up to government; but as the poll above indicates, society still knows what must be done. So we must help society become its best: active, alive, awake, governing itself against the whims of its rulers. Society must come to understand that democracy is not electing the best people; democracy is governing oneself, and limiting the powers of government as much as possible.

In sum, it will not be the president who will fix America’s problems, and it never will be. America’s problems must be fixed by the people. The people must be energized, and brought back into the daily life of the nation. This is the only real hope for America.

This entry was posted on Saturday, February 9th, 2008 at 9:49 am and is filed under Alternative Living, Freedom and Democracy. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.