[Martina]

In my life so many, so many ideological changes can be marked by the Reagan administration. Because of that administration, many of the useful functions of government were dismantled or neglected into ruin. People do not see what government does for them because it doesn't DO much for them. They have come to believe that living in the richest third world country on the planet is normal. Especially in California.

Government is ineffectual and expensive and full of people talking shit that has nothing to do with our real lives. It's amazing that so many of the poor and working poor actually do vote. Who is talking about gun violence? Tell me what issue has a greater impact on the lives of poor Californians, for example?

How can we not be talking A LOT more about all the people who have lost their houses to foreclosure? Because it involves a criticism of Wall Street? Because it illustrates a massive failure of government? But Americans aren't demanding they do that. We had the Occupy Movement, but if you look at this election, it's as if that hadn't even happened? With the Citizens United decision, is there any question who owns government and that it's not the people?

I admit that education has failed to create an educated electorate. I just taught the Declaration of Independence to juniors and seniors in high school. All of them claimed to have never heard it before.

Whatever causes they attribute it to, people know that government rarely represents their interests. They know that the Bush-Gore election was stolen. People have to work to remember why we should believe in a positive role for government.

There was an article in Vanity Fair this year that talked about how many young people got into government and journalism because of The West Wing. I remember watching it and taking it in like a starved person. We so wanted to believe that government really worked like that.

From that Vanity Fair article:

For budding politicos, The West Wing was a once-a-week life raft, an alternative universe where civic-mindedness, while buffeted, ultimately triumphed. For liberals in particular, Martin Sheen’s Nobel Prize-winning, Latin-speaking President Bartlet was a soothing foil to George W. Bush’s down-home anti-intellectualism and execrable consonant swallowin’; it was as if each week Sorkin and his colleagues were writing the counter-factual, shoulda-been history of the Gore administration.

There will always be people on the far left and the far right who are deeply suspicious of government. That's good. We need that. But that the center is so disillusioned, so willingly disenfranchised by apathy and ignorance, is not good and not entirely their fault. It's the result of an ideology that upheld the freedom of corporations to pursue profit above any public good.

Under Nixon, no one questioned that there was a role for regulation. That so many people continue to blame big government for their woes is not just because people like Carl Rove succeeded brilliantly. It is a result of the apparent early success of Reagan economics, which Clinton did nothing to revise. Why would he? Silicon Valley was making a lot of people rich.

But now these policies have led to their inevitable conclusion. That the profits made by the working people of the U.S. (and other countries) go hidden and untaxed in offshore accounts while we take on the burden of debt created through, among other things, tax breaks given to these same corporations . . . that restricting corporate contributions to campaigns is a considered a restriction on free speech, that our highest court decided that . . . while people like Mitt Romney call us lazy for not succeeding as he did (by, ironically, dismantling and destroying the businesses that actually created wealth) . . . these elephants in the living room of our democracy make it hard to believe anything other than that government has handed its power over to the market.

Government is going to have to stand up to Wall Street and corporate interests and show that it really is in charge before people will be able to to see it for what it could be, for what it should be, the force by which we direct our collective lives. It is not that now. There is no consent of the governed when the ones making the decisions that most affect our lives are not elected by the people. We don't even know their names.
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On offshore accounts (from Forbes):

Once employed by gangsters such as Meyer Lansky and Lucky Luciano, these secret bank accounts have grown so vast and lawless that some experts tell the Trib they fear the amount of money involved threatens societies from China to Africa, Europe and the United States. World leaders railed against the impact of secret havens during the G20 summit in Pittsburgh three years ago.

“They have caused a huge imbalance in the market,” said John Christensen, director of London-based Tax Justice Network, which was established by the British Parliament in 2003 to examine tax issues worldwide.

“They are the very opposite of capitalism, which is supposed to be based on transparency. They are the shadow economy.”

From Switzerland and a couple of Caribbean islands, the black holes are in 70 or more countries. Christensen said studies by several organizations, including the International Monetary Fund, put the total stash at as much as $25 trillion.

In contrast, the Commerce Department pegs the gross national product of the United States at more than $15 trillion.

The black holes emit no light, according to organizations that study them, including the IRS. They hide owners and assets. Officers and directors are strawmen. Host countries get little, if any, taxes and earn fees mostly by promising to keep everyone in the dark. Few public records exist.

Owners revealed by accident typically are corporations in other black holes halfway across the world.

Though tax evasion and avoidance are only part of the reason for the shadow economy, they play a role. Tax losses to the United States amount to $1 trillion over a decade, according to the Congressional Research Service. That’s the amount congressional leaders tried to cut in last summer’s deficit showdown.