Can
Our Businesses Save Us From Our Government?
Our legislative representatives in Washington don't seem to care
about anything other than themselves. At least we are seeing some sense of
responsibility among our corporations.
It's so sad to watch the colossal amounts of time wasted in
painfully over-extended House and Senate proceedings that get knowingly dragged
out by the formalistic reliance of old men and women on stupid and arcane
voting protocols like the baseless and incessant demands for roll calls of the
"ayes and nays." Or the fact that Senate procedural rules preclude President
Biden's ability to include a $15 minimum wage as part of the pending relief
package. We're watching arthritic aging in real time. These out-of-touch,
fossilized and embittered people spend their days looking forward to the past.
Forget anything as complicated as abandoning the filibuster.
These public servants can barely put one foot in front of the other and make
their decrepit ways to their chambers and back, as their staffs labor to
explain to them what little in the way of consequence or progress may have
happened while they were on the floor chatting with their pals. Seniority has
spawned - with a few notable exceptions, like the Speaker - senility,
sycophancy, and pervasive paralysis in the once hallowed and now much
diminished halls of the Capitol.
These pathetic poseurs perform for the benefit of their
theoretical -- but honestly indifferent and disinterested -- "constituents."
The repetitious, cantankerous, showboating by new and old legislators alike,
who play at "respectfully" addressing each other in stilted and
meaningless language, serves only themselves. We'd all benefit if they would
simply speak the plain truth, should they happen to stumble upon it, about the
liars, traitors, and seditionists in their very midst.
Comity in Congress was killed by the Republicans in less than a
decade, and there's only the faintest hope in some minds that all vestiges of
duty, frankness, and honesty haven't also been extinguished. With straight
faces and ultimate obliviousness, the newest entrants proudly confess that they
hire staffs focused on communication and fundraising events rather than
developing and advancing legislation, or doing the other critical committee
work of Congress. Because all that really matters to them is the exposure and
the bucks. Since the Supreme Court foolishly equated
money with speech, it's the only thing these grifters care about.
They know for certain that the worst possible mistake any of them can make is
to fall short on their cash calls to their prospects and donors. The terribly
sad question is, who will save us from ourselves and our worst instincts?
And, as millions continue to suffer and starve, as vaccines wait
for distribution and are sometimes wasted, and as thousands of Americans die
each day, these hypocrites and phonies continue to prance and play at their
stupid and silly power games. Rancid Rand Paul refuses to wear a mask on the
Senate floor. Lauren Boebert tries to bypass new metal detectors with her gun
and abuses the Capitol police just days after the deadly January 6th debacle
-- which she supported and encouraged -- killed one of their fellow officers.
And yes, they had to have another party-line vote over fines for the idiots who
refused to follow the new security rules.
There's no shame left among these assholes and no end in sight
to the damage they do every day to our country. Trump and his willing disciples
replaced facts and function with a crass and dishonest methodology predicated
on fear and favoritism. Any normal business run for even a day like the ongoing
congressional clown show would be long gone and little missed.
Basic legislative steps, implementing simple solutions,
unwinding Trump's many traumatic missteps, and initiating new and
straightforward curative actions will take weeks, if not months, to accomplish
because we're stuck with literally dozens of ignorant and ill-intentioned
clowns and cowards in our national governing bodies. Of course, many of the
state legislatures are even worse, but that's a topic for another time.
We're watching the slow and painful death by a thousand cuts and
crazy kooks of a system of governance that survived every manner of affront and
assault for centuries. And no one seems willing, able, or interested in its
redemption as they care solely about advancing - at whatever cost - their own
selfish and sordid agendas and ambitions.
Having emerged from four awful years of every kind of
misbehavior imaginable and 30,000 plus falsehoods by
a Liar-in-Chief who should already be in jail, whatever the hopes for
restoration that Biden offers remain sadly mired in the cesspool of greed,
corruption and indifference that is our Congress today. Imagine a civics
teacher trying to explain to our children how the system was designed and
intended to work in the tragic light of how poorly and ineffectively it
operates these days. How fully it's been co-opted and captured by special
interests, lobbyists, lunatics, and pitiful and cowardly people whose sole
interest is in their own re-election. The system the Founders designed would
seem like a dream of long-gone democracy, or a wild fantasy.
One faint light at the end of this awful tunnel is the
possibility that the many corporations that have withheld new PAC donations (or
sought refunds) from the 160-plus Republicans who voted against democracy will
stay the course and cease funding these traitors and seditionists. But the
rotten system runs pretty deep when you learn that Microsoft's PAC gave
donations to seditionist Sen. Josh Hawley, and that Microsoft CEO Brad Smith
says he didn't even know about it. Not his department, he said.
"Good enough for government work" used to be a high
compliment and an expression of pride of craft as well as something to aspire
to. Today what we accept as appropriate governance is basically inept and noisy
inaction and incompetence. The crass and common people we now elect to office
reflect - not our highest goals and ideals - but the lowest possible
denominators and the most. as opposed to the least, objectionable of
candidates. Because those are the kinds of nut cases and loonies who initially
prevail in our local primary systems, where only the extremists on both ends of
the spectrum take the time to vote.
The best we can expect and hope for from a neutered and divided
Congress, given their connivance and acquiescence, is that they do no more harm
than Trump has done. It's a very low and very depressing bar.
FEB 16, 2021
The
opinions expressed here by Inc.com columnists are their own, not those of
Inc.com.
