Glenn Greenwald is indisputably a great writer, but today he offers a Top 10 List that should be found in every high school and college text book in America.
Greenwald's list is about the bail-out essentially, but he nails how our government works via the first sentence of every list.
To wit:
- Incredibly complex and consequential new laws are negotiated in secret and then enacted immediately, with no hearings, no real debate, no transparency.
- Those who created the crisis, were wrong about everything, drive the process.
- Public opinion is largely ignored, as always, and public anger is placated through illusory, symbolic and largely meaningless concessions.
- The Government begins with demands for absolute power so brazen and absurd that anything, by comparison, seems reasonable.
- Wall Street, large corporations and their lobbyists own the Federal Government and both parties, and (therefore) they always win.
- The people who run the Washington Establishment are drowning in conflicts of interest.
- For all the anger over what Wall St. has done, the Government -- as it bails them out -- isn't doing anything to rein in their practices.
- When the Government wants greater and greater power and wants to engage in pure corruption, it need only put the population in extreme fear and it gets its way in every case.
- On the most consequential and fundamental questions that define the country, the establishment/leadership of both political parties are in full agreement, and insulate themselves from any political ramifications by acting jointly.
- Whenever you think that the Government has done things so extreme that it can't top itself -- torture, theories of presidential lawbreaking, a six-year war justified by blatantly false pretenses -- it always tops itself.
He nails all of it: Elitist secrecy that forbids the participation of "outsiders"; dumb kooks being allowed to fail upwards; Washington's disdain (if not out-and-out hatred) for the proletariat; government hubris; a corrupt-to-the-core political machine that, in the end, can accomplish nothing but re-define its self as a destructive force; a political culture of bribery that, in the end, reveals every Washington politician to be a hypocrite; playing the Bushian fear card in order to reign in the rebellious; no real distiction between Democrat and Republican when the nation, more than ever, needs that distinction defined; a thirst for high drama as opposed to a serious, mature approach in a time of high crisis.
Like I said, our kids need to be learning this stuff for their own good.
Because we never learned it, and look at where we are now.
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