Both Parties Fail American Citizens And Democracy

Donald A. Collins | 12 February 2016
Church and State

As I listen to the cacophony of political babble in this year’s Presidential debates, it at long last seems to offer a new paradigm in US politics, namely a discussion of immigration policy and talk of real reform.

It has perhaps dawned on a substantial number of American citizens particularly the young that both our major political parties, which I have dubbed our Externalist Parties, no longer represent their constituents, but work for the big money and the power that elected them.

What is an externalist? Take a coal company that destroys the environment and then fails to clean up a mess which us taxpayers get to foot. Take the huge import of cheap labor aliens whose welfare, education and crimes get dumped on taxpayers. Many of us are getting wise to this.

Now after years of reporting by real reform advocates on many concerns about our failure to reform our broken immigration policies, Americans can perhaps hope that this issue of real immigration reform will get fully debated this year.

However, so far none of the candidates from either major party, including Trump, who first brought the real immigration issue out of the establishment shadows of both parties, has properly emphasized the key to making the necessary real step toward meaningful immigration reform.

What is that??? Making E verify permanent and mandatory for all employers and or all their employees past and present. Simply making sure of the legality of a prospective employee by checking with the US Government’s SS numbers.

While building a wall has symbolic power with many voters, we know all too well that once an illegal alien (please let’s stop constantly hearing that odious “undocumented immigrant” term) makes it into America the chances of apprehension are slim.

Again, those of us who have so long worked for real immigration reform must make clear that we are not anti immigrant. And, Mr. Trump, we must be careful not to be anti Moslem, or anti any religion, except when religious sects push governments to obey the unhealthy strictures of monotheistic religions such as have crippled lives for millenniums, particularly women on family planning.

These powerful religious sects, particularly the Catholic Church, have sided with their own best interests, wanting more members regardless of what these plethora of largely poor and uneducated aliens can bring to the betterment of America.

When religious beliefs collide with personal freedoms and then amass improper power within powerful religious sects, then the efforts on civil society’s ability to govern sensibly and equitably becomes dangerously undemocratic. By the way, how did we get 6 Catholic US Supreme Court Justices?

As we find ourselves amidst a very unique Presidential election year, there is great hubris from President Obama about his 8 year record, to which as a Democrat I do not totally dismiss.

However, Obama kept making bad decisions on vital issues such as real immigration reform which has ballooned our numbers from under 200 million in 1965 to over 320 million now, a number destined to reach 450 by mid century if unchecked.

Many young people like Bernie Sanders. Are they just silly idealists? Likewise, many young people must find Trump’s immigration message appealing as many are finding jobs tough to come by after graduation from high school or college.

Certainly Sanders is right that the richest among us have gotten richer for decades while our Middle Class and blue collar workers have been declining in numbers due to the export of jobs to low wage nations and the growing automation of our jobs at home.

Without doubt there are many other important issues on the table. For examples, our dangerously flawed vision about our global military aggressiveness, our antipathy toward really funding family planning programs here and overseas, our slow awakening belief in global warming, our failure to even study real alternatives to better gun control, the growing concern about terrorist threats and how to handle them, and our stupid handling of drug addicts, there remains much to improve.

My many recent OP ED pieces deal with many of these issues, but perhaps the biggest threat on the above list goes largely unnoted by the main stream media, namely the transition of our democratic republic to rule by oligarchies which control both of our major political parties. No wonder Trump has scared them.

Remember Ike’s 1961 warning to be aware of the power of the industrial military complex? It has happened.

The political scene has been wildly shaken by the arrival of Donald Trump whose initial touting of real immigration reform rocketed him into first place in Republican polling and shook up the two major parties, which as noted above I have dubbed in earlier writings as the Externalist Parties, because both of them have been putting their selfish interests on cheap labor immigration and unbridled offensive weapons spending for military adventures overseas above their duties to protect Americans.

American’s have a big drug problem—yes, that one too—but we are even more hooked on military spending just like heroin addicts. Try to cut a big defense program or close a domestic military base and the screams of the unemployed are quickly heard in Congress. Can we get off the military addiction? I doubt it.

Oh, yes, we are defending ourselves they say. And look at the great technology we have derived from defense programs.

However, a citation from the Prologue of the late Chalmers Johnson’s last book, Nemesis, neatly sums up what has happened—really since our CIA installed the Shah in Iran in 1953 but of course our actions as part of what used to be called Manifest Destiny is about America’s empire building.

This Nemesis quote is from The Guardian, written by Arandhati Roy on September 27, 2001, just after the 911 attacks and before the utter arrogant stupidity of George W. Bush’s responses.

Who is Osama Bin Laden really? Let me rephrase that. What is Osama bin Laden? He’s America’s family secret. He is the American President’s darkest Doppelganger. The savage twin of all that purports to be the beautiful and civilized. He has been sculpted from the spar rib of a world laid to waste by America’s foreign policy: its gunboat diplomacy, its nuclear arsenal, its vulgarly stated policy of “full spectrum dominance”, its chilling disregard for non American lives, its barbarous military interventions, its support for despotic and dictatorial regimes, its merciless economic agenda that has munched through the economies of poor countries like a cloud of locusts … Now that the family secret has been spilled, the twins are blurring into one another and gradually becoming interchangeable.

Finally, a look in the rear view mirror of abject mistakes places blame on many. However, perhaps worst among them them was the US Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision which made corporations people and meant that Exxon for example can give as much money to political campaigns as it wishes. Individual citizens pitted against the Exxons!!! Talk about money in politics, but I have heard no candidate pumping for the urgency of getting Citizens United’s legislative repeal.

How would any of those running for President if elected handle the above concerns? It is impossible to predict, but worth serious thought, Folks, when Americans go to the polls this Fall.

Former US Navy officer, banker and venture capitalist, Donald A. Collins, a free lance writer living in Washington, DC., has spent over 40 years working for women’s reproductive health as a board member and/or officer of numerous family planning organizations including Planned Parenthood Federation of America, Guttmacher Institute, Family Health International and Ipas. Yale under graduate, NYU MBA. He is the author of From the Dissident Left: A Collection of Essays 2004-2013.

From the Dissident Left: A Collection of Essays 2004-2013

By Donald A. Collins
Publisher: Church and State Press (July 30, 2014)
ASIN: B00MA40TVE
Kindle Store

Bill Clinton Explains Why Sanders & Trump Are Doing So Well

Chalmers Johnson on American Hegemony

Be sure to ‘like’ us on Facebook