As the country continues its fast downward spiral into becoming a plutocratic Banana Republic, a large segment of the population continues to believe that the we still have a functional political system, and because of this erroneous belief, they keep expecting politicians to be responsive to the will of the electorate.
The system, as it is today, is broken beyond repair. It is afflicted by endemic influence-peddling corruption due to political bribery.
This fact does not necessarily mean that people should disengage from participating in electoral politics, but it does means that people need to find ways to put sufficient pressure on the system acting from outside the two-party establishments, at a grassroots level.
A recent research study co-authored by a UC Berkeley researcher found that there is a significant disconnect between constituents' public opinions about important issues, and politicians' perception and understanding of those opinions: "What Politicians Believe About Their Constituents: Asymmetric Misperceptions and Prospects for Constituency Control"
We reexamine prospects for constituency control in American politics with original data describing nearly 2,000 state legislative candidates’ perceptions of mass opinion in their districts and recent advances in public opinion estimation that allow us to determine actual districtlevel opinion with precision. Actual district opinion explains only a modest share of the variation in politicians’ perceptions of their districts’ views. Moreover, there is a striking conservative bias in politicians’ perceptions, particularly among conservatives: conservative politicians systematically believe their constituents are more conservative than they actually are by more than 20 percentage points on average, and liberal politicians also typically overestimate their constituents’ conservatism by several percentage points. A follow-up survey demonstrates that politicians appear to learn nothing from democratic campaigns or elections that leads them to correct these shortcomings. Electoral selection has a limited impact on whether the chosen representative is congruent with the majority of her constituents. These findings suggest a substantial conservative bias in American political representation and bleak prospects for constituency control of politicians when voters’ collective preferences are less than unambiguous.
The emphasis is mine.
What I understand by "conservative bias" is basically a bias towards policies that are instigated by business cartels (and the control they have over politicians), by and large. This I attribute to what I consider to be "political bribery."
As reported by the Center for Responsive Politics, from 1998 to 2011, of the 352 members of Congress who left office, 79 percent ended up working as lobbyists at some point.
Although the influence powerhouses that line Washington's K Street are just a few miles from the U.S. Capitol building, the most direct path between the two doesn't necessarily involve public transportation. Instead, it's through a door—a revolving door that shuffles former federal employees into jobs as lobbyists, consultants and strategists just as the door pulls former hired guns into government careers. While officials in the executive branch, Congress and senior congressional staffers spin in and out of the private and public sectors, so too does privilege, power, access and, of course, money.
The emphasis is mine.
And of course, we are not only talking about members of Congress. There is also a revolving door of influence-peddling corruption for Congressional staffers:
After every election, the Revolving Door spins a little faster, as headhunters for lobbying firms and interest groups snatch up departing government officials and aides... A current or former staffer may have developed a lawmaker's political strategy as chief of staff, managed his or her contact with reporters as press secretary or worked in any number of official capacities in his or her office. While some congressional staffers may instead make their way into academia, start a business or have nothing to do with government after leaving it, capitalizing on their Capitol Hill connections to represent private interests has a powerful incentive: money.
And so this kind of grotesque (legalized) political bribery explains why electoral selection has "limited impact on whether the chosen representative is congruent with the majority of her constituents."
It also explains many other things. In fact, I argue that herein lies the root of the political dysfunction in this country, and the dire consequences for average citizens.
It is why Wall Street was able to loot and pillage the nation's treasury (and are still at it), and it also explains why we now have a veritable two-tiered justice system, as admitting by AG Eric Holder when he said he's afraid to prosecute criminal banksters because it may affect the world economy.
How can we address this situation? What kind of action can we take to turn things around, to put sufficient pressure on the system in order to effect real change? I argue that the first thing we need to do is to admit that the system is broken and then unite in a nationwide network focused on stamping out influence-peddling corruption wherever it may be.
Each blue dot on the map below represents a member of a growing nation-wide network of social justice and anti-corruption activists committed to finding the best way forward. Join us in the effort!
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