Towards Voluntaryism (Part 18)
3.1. Government: Current State of Corruption
"Behind the ostensible government sits enthroned an invisible government owing no allegiance and acknowledging no responsibility to the people." - Theodore Roosevelt
Towards Voluntaryism (Part 18)
Government: Current State of Corruption - Why Action is Needed
I contend that it takes minimal objective capacity to recognize that the governmental and political structures of virtually every country on Earth have been hopelessly perverted, subverted and corrupted to benefit a criminal class of bad actors colloquially known as "the elite".
The nature of this corruption is so blatant and all-pervasive that 74% of the population in the USA no longer believes their elected representatives actually run the country. And they're right. The political class, almost without exception, demonstrates on a daily basis that is has zero integrity and zero credibility on any topic that could stop the fleecing of the population by plutocratic predators or promote liberty for the individual.
Oligarchs and corporate interests have unabashedly abused their wealth to corrupt and subvert the course of justice, pass and change laws to their private benefit, promote their private ideologies over that of public wellbeing, eliminate the consequences of their criminal behavior and to actively engage in full-spectrum subjugation and suppression warfare (social, environmental, political, economic) against humanity as a whole.
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To facilitate their perfidy, the criminal class has established numerous internationalist organizations, non-government organizations and systems of crony global governance that actively subvert and attack the sovereignty of nation states. Both directly and by extension, these organizations blatantly attack and undermine the rights and freedoms of individuals globally. The primary vehicle is a pig-in-lipstick narrative, promoted by a captured corporate media, that advocates the dissolution of the nation state, enslavement of the individual and centralized global governance while claiming it will benefit all of mankind.
This disingenuous coercive collectivist narrative promises security in exchange for freedom and labels logical discernment of the good as the hateful discrimination of immoral bigotry. Populations are increasingly kept in check by criminalizing free speech and criticism of the political establishment by redefining anything resembling dissent as hate speech. What was once a system of largely functional representative democracies in the West has become a rabid plutocracy actively hostile to the wellbeing and pre-political (i.e. natural) rights of the individual.
Watch: Black Pigeon Speaks - The UK: Rise of the Anarcho-Tyranny State (we are here):
In my opinion, the political class as a whole has been bribed, blackmailed, unduly influenced, manipulated or threatened into acting against the will of the people they are supposed to represent and serve. Just one recent example saw a law-abiding citizen, Lissa Lucas, forcibly silenced for presenting absolutely true facts about private "donations" (i.e. bribes) to public servants acting against the best interests of their constituency.
Due to this egregious state of affairs, I propose that any financial subversion of public servants by private entities should be absolutely forbidden. The depth and seriousness of the corruption at this time has become so harmful to society that I contend even the seemingly innocuous instance of a public servant getting a free drink from a lobbying instance should be banned entirely. Gifting or donations to public servants from any instance that hopes to achieve a private economic advantage or other institutionalization of privilege over competitors via government coercion must be stringently restricted.
Gifting must be restricted because it predisposes the recipient to think favorably of the gift-giver and to encourage reciprocity. This is a simple truism based on human nature that transcends cultural barriers and has been confirmed time and again in research situations. Any public servant who claims they are immune to being influenced by gifts or donations is undeniably delusional or actively protecting their ability to profit from unethical behavior. See the Markulla Center for Applied Ethics "Gifts and Bribes" for an overview of this issue.
Furthermore, the more value a gift has, especially if experiential (travel, vacations etc.), the more it influences the recipient; this means even small gifts have undue influence, regardless of the recipient's self-serving and (perhaps unintentionally) disingenuous claims of being able to preserve impartiality. As just one passage from The Roosevelt Institute's study "Fifty Shades of Green" reports:
"Every additional $1,000 dollars decreased the odds of voting against by 24 percent. Similarly, contributions from firms opposed to network neutrality were also telling: every $1,000 increased the chances of a vote against by 2.6 percent...
...Money influences key congressional floor votes on both finance and telecommunication issues. Americans may not have the “best Congress money can buy”—after all, as they note, their results could be even bleaker—but there is no point in pretending that what appears to be the voice of the people is really often the sound of money talking."
I believe this is equally true if the public servant anticipates a gift (i.e. reward/bribe) after the fact, a point substantiated by the Markkula Center (see above). If more evidence was needed that public servants cannot be trusted to regulate themselves to limit the undue influence of others upon them, look no further than Michael Krieger's recent discussion treating lobbying by foreign powers, parts 1 and 2 to see just how corrupt the system is.
This absurd state of affairs only escalates when those public servants go to work for the corporations they passed laws or regulations to assist after they leave office. The blatantly unethical behavior of the revolving door between politics and corporations can only be considered an intentional loophole in the system, instituted and maintained by the corrupt, so that these people are not considered criminals.
For a brief overview please view this video on Washington's revolving door by the London School of Economics and Political Science:
Then view Bill Moyers' discussion providing concrete examples of just how bad it really is:
As Mike Krieger of Liberty Blitzkrieg recently opined:
Further, as Michael Snyder has detailed at The Economic Collapse Blog, congressmen are expected to be fund-raisers for the political parties spending 4 hours a day fundraising instead of doing the job they were elected to do.
How much money a congressman raises for his political party determines how much influence he is allowed to have in Congress by determining which committees he can belong to and at what level of authority. Political parties are NOT governmental institutions, they are private organizations. Such behavior is the very definition of a corrupt pay-to-play scheme - and it runs the country:
In politics, pay to play refers to a system...by which one pays (or must pay) money to become a player... Typically, the payer (an individual, business, or organization) makes campaign contributions to public officials, party officials, or parties themselves, and receives political or pecuniary benefit such as no-bid government contracts, influence over legislation, political appointments or nominations, special access or other favors. source
I contend that the only effective recourse at this stage of political unaccountability and the capitulation of representative governance to moneyed interests is to eliminate any and all direct financial motive for public servants to cater to special interests in carrying out the function of their office. Moreover, it has become necessary to restructure how private interests can affect public policy via material and experiential contributions to individuals occupying public office.
Placing restrictions on public servants' ability to unethically profit from their positions will never realistically be undertaken by the beneficiaries of corruption themselves and will certainly be actively opposed by those who can afford to pull their strings. Thus it will fall to the population to bear the responsibility of bringing the proposition to the ballot box for the general public to vote into effect a law that forces public servants to be accountable to their constituencies. This does not mean to raise up leaders to whom we delegate authority to "make things better", but to take upon ourselves the responsibility to ensure that those who claim to be public servants actually serve the best interests of their constituencies.
In the following suggestions, I hope to provide an avenue to do just that.
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