by Joseph Whalen

Created on: April 05, 2011

Unfortunately the United States is damned with a system of government in which our elected representatives are both rich and clever. They are rich enough to buy their elected positions which eliminate the significance of the individual citizen in the election process.  They are clever enough to siphon off as much money and power as possible then turn their office into a money and patronage pit and a long term career.

The concept of a democracy, or a democratic republic such as the United States was to empower the people in self rule.  Our founding fathers never intended on elected government officials creating a new class of nobility for the rich and politically connected.  However this is exactly what we have in our country today.  An upper class of political office holders who are no different than the landed nobility of medieval Europe.

Operating under the precept that we have an elected government, the clever rich politicians carefully manipulate the political system to their own ends.  Creating laws that specifically favor their own interests or simply ignoring existing laws that would condemn them for some of their more creative and questionable actions.  Money is what runs our government; it is what buys our votes and it is what passes legislation.  The common people have no say in today’s representative government.

As we approach the 150th anniversary of Lincoln’s famous Gettysburg Address speech it has become painfully apparent that his lament that “government of the people, by the people, for the people shall not perish from the earth” has come to pass. Lincoln was concerned about a bitter and bloody civil war tearing the nation apart and compromising the principles on which our country was founded.  It is likely he never foresaw that it would be the very government itself and the political system that was supposed to make the United States unique and a world leader that did far more harm to the country than the war of Lincolns time that claimed over six hundred thousand American lives.

As our country has continued to spiral into debt with us increasingly beholden to foreign investors over the past thirty years, our politicians have focused their attention and effort on internal political squabbling. Instead of addressing the issues that are the most pressing to our country our elected officials engage in an ever more frenzied money and power grab on the floor of the very buildings that heroes like George Washington laid the corner stone of.

Thanks to our rich and clever elected representatives the United States has allowed itself to become a pitiful shadow of what it once was.  You can keep both rich and clever elected representatives and instead give us honest and intelligent citizens to run the country.  Having to pick either rich or clever is having to pick the lesser of two evils.  Given the choice, clever is likely to be less damaging than rich.  But keep in mind, picking the lesser of two evils is still picking evil. Left to the hands of career politicians who are either rich or clever or both, there is little hope that our country will survive to crawl out of the quagmire of greed and corruption that generations of rich and clever politicians have landed us in.

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