Rising Center


With the announcement that he is leaving the Republican Party, New York mayor Michael Bloomberg has signaled the potential rise of a third party which can break the hold of the Democrats and Republicans, both having become corrupt. One is corrupt by being sadistic and the other is corrupt by being masochistic. It is time for restraining orders and stable relatives to look after the children for awhile.

The ticket most independents, or centrists, might like better than almost anything imaginable would be a ticket with Bloomberg and Schwarzenegger. But if a foreign born person can't be President, I guess he or she can't be second in command, either. But that provision was to keep foreign influences from taking over and corrupting the republic, and that has already happened. The international corporations control the government now, through capitalizing their own representatives into the Presidency. The idea that our current President represents the interests of the citizenry has become laughable. He represents the interests of crime families so rich they can afford respectability.

Once I found a book called "Liberty and the Great Libertarians: The Laconics of Liberty" in a burn pile beside an old house. I pulled it out and kept it, and read quotations from it often. It inspired pride in me that I belonged to a tradition of people who refuse to elevate mortal men to godlike status, and who follow a Constitution which makes it illegal for power to come from any source other than the people themselves. Powers belong to the people, and is delegated to leaders. The power can be taken back at any time.

One of the central protections in keeping this power in the hands of the people is that the military is composed of the people, ordinary citizens, and cannot be used against the citizenry. The President cannot declare war Constitutionally. That is why we now fight undeclared wars and call them police actions. The administrative branch has taken over the military, but that is not now and never will be Constitutional.

By observing this, we might be less philosophical about the overthrow of the Constitution by a radical right wing, supported by a mainstream party. The shift of control over the military from the Congress to the President has not shifted back to again align with the intent of the Constitution. When we lose the right to a trial by our peers, the freedom from unwarranted search and seizure in our homes, the right of habeas corpus, and even the right to pass laws which cannot be disregarded by the President through signing statements, there is no guarantee that a more ethical administration is going to come in and restore them.

Maybe the problem is that we are not educated when we are young to know our heros. I knew them because I was in a book club when I was a child, a book club that sent a volume every month telling the story of one of those heros. From Ethan Allen to Alexander Hamilton, from George Washington to Thomas Jefferson, the founding heros refused colonial control over their resources and fought the larger and richer enemy with what could easily have been called (and were called by the British) terrorist tactics.

I am ready for a third party that is not playing family feud instead of governing, and which can and will reestablish the plainly intended meaning of the Constitution into policy. It's no good believing in an abstract idea if you can't apply it at the practical level. If all powers not specifically delegated to the government belong to the people, then the people can get rid of the two party system and move to restore confidence in government through two simple shifts. We need to elect the President by popular vote, and we need to have proportional representation.

What keeps everybody out of the game except the Republicans and Democrats is that splitting the vote can have disastrous consequences, as proved the case in 2000. If the Green Party had been given it's votes, or if the Libertarian Party was given its votes, then these votes could be combined with another party's in exchange for representation in the ruling coalition. When there is no use to vote if you can't get half plus one, because the half plus one candidate becomes The Decider for everyone, voting becomes a tired ritual.

I find it self-evident that every major institution, from finance to law to medicine to agriculture, is now corrupted, and is incapable of acting in the best interests of the country. And the major parties are so embedded in these corrupt institutions that they have as much chance of operating outside the corruption as intestinal parasites have of learning to play ping pong. We don't have health care for the simple reason that our legislators are paralyzed by the political cost of standing up to organized crime wearing a cross. We don't have free education when any person in the world could have interactive access to the finest minds on the planet. We don't have free wireless internet because the emphasis is on protecting existing toll booths, not the public good. Our food supply is tainted. Instead of sending cheap labor in to the break unions, the jobs are shipped off to the cheap labor, depleting our manufacturing base and endangering our security as well as disenfranchising our working class. The list can go on and on.

Everybody is protecting their turf. Most people who buy music know that the centrality of distribution is a thing of the past. Anybody can produce and distribute music. To keep the profits up as if the technology was still prohibitively expensive requires stifling innovation by law, which our government cheerfully does.

Internet radio is one example. For the first time ever, the control over what people listen to slipped away from the music producers and fixers. Suddenly you can get any kind of music in the world on internet radio, and there is an explosion of creativity. So the fees charged for playing the music suddenly explode as a way to wipe out this creative growth. Why? Because there are a lot of legislators who take money in return for solving problems for their clients. And their clients are the owners, not the consumers.

The problem Bloomberg will face is that there is a well deserved fear among the American voters that they have to support one of the major parties or throw their vote away. But if ever there was a time when there is an opening for a third party to drive the money changers out of the temple, it's now. I know Bloomberg is no Christ figure. Most Jewish billionaires aren't. On the other hand most Jewish billionaires don't list their home number in the white pages and take the subway to work. And probably most of them didn't sell Christmas wreathes to earn money to go to summer camp.

I have been a Democrat because I was forced to choose between the lesser of two evils. But when the Democratic majority lacked the balls the just send Mr. Bush the same bill he vetoed and to hell with him if he kept vetoing it, I got turned off on them. Sometimes you have to draw a line, and they can't do that.

Maybe we have to make sure their fears of losing the election come true so they can stop worrying about it and do what we sent them to Washington to do. I will be happy to accommodate them now that they've caved in and proved the two party system has turned into a BDSM marriage, with their party being the bitch.

The first law of Cybernetics (systems) is that the system with the widest parameters controls because it can contain the other systems but they cannot contain it. That is why a sadist, who needs control, is always going to be controlled by that need. It is the weaker position. So I would vote for a Democrat over a Republican for the simple reason that the Republicans are in the weaker role in the marriage. You can tell from all that bluster and strutting around. They will make us less secure because they are themselves insecure.

But I'd vote for a way to get out of this disfunctional family we've been stuck with in a New York minute.

Posted: Wed - June 20, 2007 at 12:52 PM