Publisher’s Note: This is the first article in the series titled “The Death of the American Dream” by the Director of Civic Engagement of Lone Star College-Kingwood, Dr. John J. Theis.
It is a free for all. Take what you can while you can, because America as you know it is ending. Everyone knows it, but no one wants to admit it. Elites on the left and right are peddling an illusion while stripping the country bare and rewarding their donors (the investor class). Working Americans know something is amiss, but they don’t know what to do. They are pitted against each other fighting for the crumbs the owners of the country are willing to throw their way.
My children and grandchildren will grow up in a country that offers them little more than a subsistence wage job and for the first time the brief history of the United States the American dream is dead (although for many people it never really existed). Even my generation, the baby boomers cling to a vision that disappeared years ago. Politics has become a charade. Both parties worship the gods of money and war. Republicans and Democrats follow a neo-liberal ideology that commoditizes everything including health and education. All sold to the highest bidder. Since Ronald Reagan proclaimed “Let’s Make America Great Again” almost 40 years ago, things have just gotten worse.
Democrats are no better. They claim to be the party of the working class but seek large contributions from the moneyed interests and fail to act against those interests when they are in power. Their candidates take hundreds of thousands of dollars from corporations for speeches, for campaigns, and for jobs. Does anyone think they are concerned about workers in any more than a tangential vote-getting sort of way?
In the 2016 election, the Democrats raised over $3.6 billion through their candidate campaigns for president, Congress, and Senate and various fundraising organizations such as the Party, the National Committee, the Democratic congressional campaign committee, and the Democratic Senatorial campaign committee. Republicans, through their same organizations and candidates, raised $3.1 billion. Also, another 1.4 billion was spent by outside groups, and there is an undiscoverable amount of Dark money. After the election, Companies spent $3.34 billion in lobbying government which is almost certainly an underestimate as the FEC requires “a good faith estimate” and any expenditures under $3000 for a quarter do not have to be reported.
But the graft and corruption don’t end when a candidate leaves office. We can vote them out but politicians just turn around peddling their influence to the highest bidder while voters seek answers to the real problems afflicting their lives. As Open Secrets puts it “Dick Armey. Tom Daschle. Tom Foley. Trent Lott. Once, these politicos ranked among Congress’ most powerful members. Today, they share another distinction: They’re lobbyists (or “senior advisors” performing very similar work). And they’re hardly alone. Dozens of former members of Congress now receive handsome compensation from corporations and special interests as they attempt to influence the very federal government in which they used to serve.”
Elected leaders and their staffs aren’t the only ones. Bureaucrats and Generals retire and collect six-figure pensions and then serve as “consultants” and lobbyists selling the wares of their corporate overlords back to the very people who they once worked with or who worked under them. Those currently serving are loath to break the system as they know they too will be retired and be able to jump on the private sector gravy train.
Michael Chertoff, former Sec. of Homeland Security, was ready to hawk body scanners for a firm he consulted with when the underwear bomber was caught. Never letting, an opportunity pass him by, he convinced the federal government to spend 118 million to buy Rapiscan body scanners to use at airports in 2008. He still pushes the sale of these scanners to the government even though the Government Accountability Office reported that “It remains unclear whether [the scanners] would have been able to detect the weapon” )
In 2007, Defense Solutions sought the services of a retired general with national stature, someone who could open doors at the highest levels of government and help it win a huge prize: the right to supply Iraq with thousands of armored vehicles. General Barry McCaffery fits the bill and four days after being hired, the general swung into action. He sent a personal note and 15-page briefing packet to David H. Petraeus, the commanding general in Iraq, strongly recommending Defense Solutions and its offer to supply Iraq with 5,000 armored vehicles from Eastern Europe. “No other proposal is quicker, less costly, or more certain to succeed,” he said.
There is also Liz Fowler who began her career at a law firm representing medical interests among others. She then moved to working in Congress, first as health care counsel for Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan and then for Rep. Pete Stark. In 2006 she left government service to become Vice President for Public Policy at WellPoint Inc. (now Anthem), a leading health benefits company. In 2008 as the Senate began to write the “Obama care” legislation, Fowler returned to government service as the senior counsel to Senator Max Baucus, chair of the finance committee charged with writing the legislation. And worse, Baucus’s chief health advisor prior to Fowler, Michelle Easton, currently lobbies for WellPoint as a principal at Tarplin, Downs, & Young. Baucus commented that “She put together the White Paper last November–2008–the 87-page document which became the basis, the foundation, the blueprint from which almost all health care measures in all bills on both sides of the aisle came.” When the bill had been passed by Congress, the President appointed Fowler to oversee the implementation of the bill as the Special Assistant to the President for Healthcare. Then in 2012, Liz Fowler left government again to go to work for Johnson and Johnson as VP for Global Health Policy.
The revolving door spins, people make money and the public wonders why the problems they face are not getting resolved by the leaders they elect. Donald Trump was right! D.C. has become a swamp of insider politics where money exchanges hand and deals are made. Trump should know. Not only did he have lobbyists work for his interests who are now cashing in in a big way, But He also contributed, over the years, to over 400 candidates and committees in amounts large enough to require reporting. When one peruses his contributions on the Open Secrets website, it quickly becomes clear that he gave to democrats and republicans in the same years. Trump knows about the Washington swamp because Trump swam in it for decades.
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