Why does nothing work like it should? Why when groceries and fuel and fertilizer cost so much is the conversation about throwing the people who harvest our food for us out of the country? Why do we all know the cause of the alarming climate change we are now witnessing daily but are not allowed to talk about, or about what to do about it? Why do the rich-- so small a percentage of the human population-- keep getting richer while the rest of us are having to do more and more with less and less? Why do we only seem capable of electing doddering idiots who do not do what we want them to do as our leaders? Why is there an electoral college that steals elections from those with the most votes, a Senate that can condemn protesters on college campuses and increase military spending at will and cut taxes of corporations and billionaires but can't seem to find enough of what we pay in taxes to fund education or implement universal health insurance or keep Social Security solvent, and a Supreme Court that seems to protect the "rights" and "speech" of corporations while every day whittling away what is left of ours? Why do we know like the back of our hands that enslaving captives from Africa for 400 years was an evil fucking thing to do and yet the descendants of those who practiced it continue to thrive from the ill-gotten wealth of their ancestors while the descendents of the enslaved continue to be deprived, impoverished, imprisoned, scorned and blamed for behaving like they're deprived, impoverished, imprisoned, scorned and blamed for everything? Why are we being forced to work deep into our senescence when our children and grandchildren can't seem to get a job? Why must I work from a closet when the lavishly appointed corner suites of the owners are almost always empty? Why are so many billionaires trying to get to outer space?
We know the answer to these and to so many other related questions including certainly many important and brilliant ones that occured to you but not to me in the time I allotted for myself to write the above. Many of us have been trained that it's impolite to say what the answer is. This is why it is so important that we recognize that a book with the answers has just been published and it has the key to everything in its title. The Blind Spot: How Oligarchs Dominate our Democracy by Jeffrey Winters is so named for the tendency of society to overlook the sociopathy and egregious wealth of the owner class. In particular, Winters focuses on the handsomely compensated Wealth Defense Industry that services the rich, that helps them hide their income, wealth and assets from the collective treasury of the masses by storing untold hordes of it in secret offshore banks and corporations-- often by taking advantage of perfectly "legal" loopholes designed for this purpose by a purposely indulgent tax code. Meanwhile, those civil servants of the IRS who would in a healthy society pursue the equitable share of the wealthy's income that could solve so many of society's problems if it could be unearthed are hamstrung by the politically appointed heads of their agencies.
As Winters' book details, none of this is accidental. The founding fathers designed our democracy to be this way. Winters asks us to consider why there was a Second Continental Congress when a Constitution had already been ratified in the first. It was to correct the errors of the first which had not had the participation of all of the slave states and which threatened to institutionalize too much democracy. As Broadway Hero Alexander Hamilton put it .".. our real Disease ... is Democracy, the poison of which by a subdivision will only be the more concentrated in each part, and consequently the more virulent." The system by which a popularly elected, large and quarrelsome House of Representatives whose size would reflect the population was checked by an aristocratically appointed Senate reflecting the acreage of the landed elite as well as by a supreme court whose members, selected by the Senate for their understanding of the mission and for their class loyalty would be granted terms for life. The net effect would be the semblance of a noisy contentious democracy among the portion of the masses permitted to vote, kept in temper by a system of "checks and balances" populated by and servicing the elite. Just enough elasticity was built in so that the balance could teeter ever so minutely in the direction of the working masses, but never so far that it could not be clawed back. The success of the American system in doing what has been emulated world wide, spreading the disease of American style democracy to every corner of the earth, making this planet that they are so eager to destroy and escape from their own no matter where they go. All over the world, thanks to the Blind Spot, oligarchs who contribute as little as they can get away with to society enjoy every fruit and benefit of the surplus of what we are forced to put into the collective pot to make up for their shirking, making them the only beneficiaries of the socialism that they covetously deprive us of.
As for American democracy, out of the ambitious overreach of the Neoliberal era, the powerlessness of the people and the extinction of the commons has become nearly complete while the balls of the Oligarchy have swollen right along with the number and size of their bank accounts. This is both a curse and a blessing in disguise because it makes the hideous egregiousness of their free ride much less easy to hide behind any façade of deservedness. Winters' book is highly recommended for its discussion of fixes, large and small, that could ultimately lead to the demise of oligarchic sway, including abolishment of the Senate, term limits and expansion of the Supreme Court, the elimination of the electoral college and simplification of the tax code to remove loopholes and enforce a progressive rate to make it prohibitive for the wealthy not to pay their fair share. Most importantly and excitingly, Winters makes a clear and unmissable case for using scientifically representative sortition-- we at unspeakable (as heck)'s favorite system-- to select our leaders.
If despising the Oligarchy for its role in fucking everything up is a crime, lock me up. Guilty as charged. But before the fix is in, do not neglect the fix.
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