I was astonished to see another article this a.m. repeating the mantra that economic disaster is a self-fulfilling prophecy. Can anyone actually be repeating this drivel who has seen the prices of everything rise, while incomes are going down, not just for the working poor? The prices of those refinanced houses has also gone down. We’re all losing purchasing power.

The real story is out there, and Sen. Bernie Sanders has it.

For years, self-proclaimed socialist U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders has been railing about the shrinking middle class and the effect of rising costs on working people.

But he didn’t know the extent of the problem until he appealed to his constituents, asking them recently to describe how America’s beleaguered economy was affecting them. He expected a few dozen replies.

The request unleashed a torrent of e-mail messages and letters describing — in soul-baring personal detail — the economic tightrope being walked by people in Vermont and beyond who are struggling to stay warm and keep food on the table. More than 869 replies came in, prompting Sanders to publish some excerpts and read others on the floor of the U.S. Senate.

“The number just blew me away,” he said Tuesday. “The power and poignancy and the pain expressed in these letters was just heartbreaking. These weren’t interviews done at the homeless shelter. These were middle-class people, working people or seniors. These weren’t people on the margin. By and large, most of the people were working people and most owned their own homes.

“It seems to me that the decline of the middle class has been taking place for years, but the rising price of gas has taken people over the economic cliff. Now, many people are desperate, and the level of desperation has really surprised me,” said Sanders, I-Vt.
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A 31-year-old woman with two children wrote that her husband was contemplating quitting his job because the pay now barely covers the gas it takes his pickup truck to get there. “Meanwhile, my mortgage is behind, we are at risk for foreclosure and I can’t keep up with my car payments,” she wrote. “My parents, both in their 60s, are back to work so that they can make ends meet, and struggle to come up with enough gas money so they can get to doctor’s appointments.”

These are not people who are driving up in cadillacs to cash their welfare check, an image the GoPervs used to make the public resent those who were unable to support themselves. The people working those two or three jobs that the cretin in chief calls “real Americans” can’t pay for their basic needs.

Meanwhile we have a few idiots at WaPo saying it’s a matter of self-fulfilling prophecies, those mythical stories that make us think we don’t get enough to eat because we can’t afford three meals a day. No, we have jobs so we should be dancing to stay warm.

According to most broad measures of how the economy is doing, it’s not all that grim.

Soft? You betcha. In recession? Quite possibly. And a crisis in the financial markets has rattled nerves for months now. But so far, the economy is holding up better than it did during the last two recessions in 1990 and 2001. Employers haven’t shed as many jobs, the unemployment rate is still relatively low, and gross domestic product has kept rising.
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Two-thirds of the economy is consumer spending. So if people’s negative outlook leads them to cut their spending, a steeper downturn could happen.

See, all you big spenders? If you just keep spending you will keep us all afloat.

There really are those business writers still trying to convince you that you need to mortgage that house and buy more. If you will just listen to those great economic indicators about productivity and keep eating the mud cookies, everything will be fine.

I heard that same line in the savings and loan crash. Value isn’t something some glib words will create, for all that the business writer is paid to tell you it is. When you can’t afford to heat or cool your home, that’s the ‘real’ economy. It isn’t make believe. And the ’socialist’ policies of allowing working people the amount they earn, a living wage, is what is needed to solve the problems our country is facing.

The gold standard has been replaced by consumer confidence, making you, the wage earner, the only value there is. And if you aren’t getting what you are earning, that is devaluation.

Bush to the BBC:

I view the Olympics as a sporting event .. there’s a lot of issues that I suspect people are gonna, you know, opine about during the Olympics. I mean, you got the Dalai Lama crowd. You’ve got global warming folks. You’ve got, you know, Darfur and … I am not gonna, you know, go and use the Olympics as an opportunity to express my opinions to the Chinese people in a public way casue I do that all the time with the president.

I could write paragraph upon paragraph attacking that inarticulate display, but I imagine most of the points are obvious to the majority of you, the readers, so I’ll just break off one piece; the Olympics as a sporting event.

As every athelete knows, sport is inherently more. To athletes, sport is work, sport is money. To sportswriters, sport is epic, filled with players, events, victories and defeats of mythological proportion. To the peanut slingers, ticket takers, souvenir vendors, cameramen and production assistants, sport is industry. Though Olympians are often amateurs, the Games are no less guided by interests and events outside the field of play.

How else to explain the enthusiasm with which cities lobby to get the games? Is it because they want to give their residents a chance to watch some good sport? Clearly not. The motives have very little to do with the actual “sporting event.”

If the Olympics are hosted judiciously, they can bring immediate profit. But that’s rarely the driving motive, and few cities have ever accomplished it. More importantly, the games bring prestige, and provide an excuse to build infrastructure that will last well beyond the actual event. The majority of the events George Bush attends, for example, will take place in a stadium or on a field that was built expressly for the Olympics.

In the case of Beijing, the construction of these stadiums adds another group to the list Bush mentioned above; “the labor rights crowd,” or maybe we’d best call them the “human rights folks,” — a recent Human Rights Watch report, One Year of My Blood, details the systematic abuses of migrant workers in Beijing:

A BBC report on Sunday’s Russian elections reminded me of the famous George Kennan quip that “we will get nearer to the truth if we abandon for a time the hackneyed question of how far Bolshevism has changed Russia and turn our attention to the question of how far Russia has changed Bolshevism.” The reporter then substitutes the word “Democracy” for “Bolshevism” to make for a nice turn of phrase and pose what seems like a provocative question. . . but is it?

I’m going to let you guys in on a little secret. I watch a lot of C-SPAN. No, really, a lot. If I had three TVs (not to mention one TV and cable, and if electricity was cheaper), those TVs would sit somewhere within my immediate sight at all times and be set to C-SPAN 1, 2, and 3. Don’t ask me why I do this. That’s irrelevant. You should just know that I watch more C-SPAN than any other writers for this website, probably combined.

That said, I’ve seen my fill of House and Senate sessions. They’re probably the best thing to watch on C-SPAN. The Senate is relatively orderly, unless someone calls for an all-night session, or something out of the ordinary occurs. The House, though? The House is a continual mess. It is non-stop raucousness. It’s like an unruly high school detention. Right before Congress went on break, the House had a wonderful mess over a disputed vote and some malfunctioning voting computers. It would have been hilarious if these people weren’t in charge of making laws for this country (okay, it still IS hilarious). But that’s not the point. The point is that there’s nothing special about the people in Congress. People in Congress have just as much (and as little) moral and intellectual aptitude as you and me. They just happened to press the right buttons, know the right people, etcetera, etcetera, to get elected. You know the drill, Jake can tell you all about that gig.

As several authors at The Seminal have argued in this issue, democracy cannot exist without the institutions and practices needed to support its function and process. In America and elsewhere, those institutions include, among others, the offices in the Legislative and Judicial branches, which work alongside the Executive to ensure the country’s success. In recent years, the Judiciary has played an increasingly important role, supporting and promoting the principles of freedom and democracy. From recent history, a series of examples illustrate the importance of maintaining and supporting an impartial judiciary, even if it stands in opposition to the Executive.

More than Electing Leaders:
As several writers at The Seminal have argued since the debut of our first article for August’s Worldwide Democracy issue, there is more to democracy than a democratically elected leader. While democracy is often touted as the end-all-be-all for national troubles, democracy, however, does not erase these problems; it simply offers an alternative means for tackling and attempting to overcome such difficulties. Support for this well-tempered idea of democracy appears on the U.S. Department of State website, which expresses this sentiment as such:

“Freedom and democracy are often used interchangeably, but the two are not synonymous. Democracy is indeed a set of ideas and principles about freedom, but it also consists of a set of practices and procedures that have been molded through a long, often tortuous history. In short, democracy is the institutionalization of freedom. For this reason, it is possible to identify the time-tested fundamentals of constitutional government, human rights, and equality before the law that any society must possess to be properly called democratic.”

The important idea here is not the importance of freedom in a democracy, but rather the importance of principles that govern and guide freedom, the “practices and procedures” that are in place to ensure the rights and needs of the people are met, which must be in place not only to protect the citizens from an unfair, imbalanced and power-hungary Executive but also to protect minority citizens from being subjected to the will of the majority. As the Department of State publication goes on to state:

All democracies are systems in which citizens freely make political decisions by majority rule. But rule by the majority is not necessarily democratic: No one, for example, would call a system fair or just that permitted 51 percent of the population to oppress the remaining 49 percent in the name of the majority. In a democratic society, majority rule must be coupled with guarantees of individual human rights that, in turn, serve to protect the rights of minorities–whether ethnic, religious, or political, or simply the losers in the debate over a piece of controversial legislation. The rights of minorities do not depend upon the goodwill of the majority and cannot be eliminated by majority vote. The rights of minorities are protected because democratic laws and institutions protect the rights of all citizens.

Though the issue of citizenship was contested in America throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and into the twentieth, (and the idea of protecting civil liberties [and human rights!] has become an issue in recent years), the underlying purpose of the democratic government of the United States is serving and protecting the freedoms and liberties of the people. However, in order to protect and promote these freedoms, more is required of democracy than a simple democratically-elected leader. Herein lies the role and importance of the impartial judiciary.

If there is one problem at the heart of all others in American politics, it is the influence of the moneyed few on public welfare.

Six months into the 2008 presidential race and primary candidates are breaking fundraising records Left and Right. Armed with the right to free speech guaranteed in the First Amendment, parties and their candidates are leaping into another campaign season unharnessed by spending limits, fundraising restrictions, or meaningful caps on soft money expenditures. So with America aggressively hailing itself as the global arbiter of democracy these days, how does its campaign financing compare to that in other countries?

In 2006 the Economist’s Index of Democracy placed Russia 102nd out of 167 countries in its democracy rating, based on a variety of factors such as civil liberties, political participation, and the electoral process. Such ratings and Putin’s government’s continued attempts to shift power away from regional governments and the Duma in favor of the Kremlin has led to the perception that democracy is being slowly but inevitably subverted in modern Russia. While I believe that Putin is indeed eroding freedoms in favor of stronger central government, most Russians accept this as a necessary evil in restoring their nation’s economic and political capital.

America — and in this article it is important we make clear that “America” signifies the government which presides over the union of fifty states in the Northern part of a landmass whose entirety shares the same name — this America preaches Democracy with all the conviction and aplomb of a minister pounding the Good Book. But with such faith come tests, and like a minister shrugging off the notion that his family line traces back to an hominid swinging in a tree, and not an architect named Noah, America seems unfazed by recent evidence that perhaps Democracy is not a benevolent end in and of itself.

Hamas, elected Democratically, has been shunned by the American government in favor of the bypassed-because-ineffectual Fatah party. In Venezuela, Hugo Chavez, re-elected with 63% of the vote, is deemed an enemy of Democracy, and is anathema in Washington. The former is understandable; Hamas has attacked Israel, a Washington ally, both verbally and physically. In the case of Venezuela, however, the animosity is not so easily traced back to its source.

Ever since the age of Enlightenment and the wave of revolutions that swept Europe in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, democracy has been the answer. When American and French revolutionaries overthrew their dictators and founded new government, they were ruled by the people. When Germany twice descended into fascism, the United States and other Allied powers went to war to bring the power back to the people. When we were faced with the red communist menace in Eastern Europe, we again relied on democracy as the right answer to tyranny. Today, the U.S. strives to sow the seeds of democracy throughout the world, from Kosovo and the Congo to our current misadventure in Iraq. However, installing democracy is often more complex and subtle then we make it out to be. What’s more, democracy doesn’t necessarily give us a friendly nation to deal with, leading me to question whether democracy really is the savior of the people that we think it is.

Our faith in democracy seems to rest upon a number of startling assumptions. When we advocate democracy as a way of government in foreign lands, we seem to be saying that as soon as a country lets their masses rule, that country’s problems will fade away. Democracy is the cure for dictators. It is the cure for economic depression. It is the cure for civil war, poverty, repression, censorship, ethnic conflict, human rights abuses, and any other ill a nation may suffer. When we advocate for democracy, we promise to bring these new democratic states into the modern age. More importantly, we promise that with democracy comes a contented and productive populace, one that will propel a country successfully into the future. As Walt Whitman said:

Did you, too, O friend, suppose democracy was only for elections, for politics, and for a party name? I say democracy is only of use there that it may pass on and come to its flower and fruit in manners, in the highest forms of interaction between [people], and their beliefs — in religion, literature, colleges and schools — democracy in all public and private life….

In practice, however, democracy can be a complex endeavor. When Americans say they want to help other countries form democracies, we are thinking of starting a system similar to our own. However, democracy comes in many flavors and colors, not all of which Americans might approve of. Today, 70% of African countries are technically democracies. However, when Robert Mugabe reported a 48% voter turnout rate, with 73% of the votes going to his party, as he did in 2005, few people actually believed that Zimbabwe is ruled by its people. Iraq has had elections and has a parliament, yet democracy hasn’t solved any of its problems thus far. All of these countries are democracies, and yet they all exhibit varying degrees of tyranny, from official censorship and human rights abuses in (technically democratic) China to overtly rigged elections throughout Africa. What’s more, with democracy Africa is still poor, Iraq is still not secure, and the Chinese still cannot protest in the streets.

Democracy is a term, in my opinion, that is used entirely too often. Our current leader, President Bush, as well as most of congress, likes to use to term in the dramatic sense of a “freedom for all” kind of political utopia. Our sometimes friends in the European Union use the “idea” democracy as a staple for their particular brand of individuality, and they pride themselves on this. But what exactly is this “democracy” thing all about anyways? Are we what we say we are? Well sort of, we’ll get to that.The dictionary defines the word democracy as “government by the people; a form of government in which the supreme power is vested in the people and exercised directly by them or by their elected agents under a free electoral system.” Let’s, for simplicity’s sake, examine this weak ass Webster’s definition of an idea. First off, America is designed and thought of as a government by and for the people. It was designed this way sometime during the summer of, when was it, 1776. Sometime around July 4th I think. While I do love the American system and the idea of Democracy (the ‘for and by the people’ aspect) I can’t help but think that we’ve deviated from this idea over time. Then again, why shouldn’t we?

Ok. I wrote those two previous paragraphs a few days ago. The final sentence was meant to be my next starting point (I do that a lot), which I had hoped would be a serious examination of “democracy” in both theory and in practice…but, well, everyone else on The Seminal writes serious stuff, so I’m just going to speak my mind. This isn’t meant to detract from the brilliance to come from Alex, J-Ro, Josh, Vas etc. but I just don’t write that way. I’m not comfortable doing it. I feel as though I’ve turned into resident “rant” guy, and that’s fine. I go with the flow, I do what I do, and I rarely make apologies for it. So democracy…for all its fucking splendor and glory, here it is: