Party System Destroys Representative Government

No doubt conservative voters who know about it are upset that House Speaker John Boehner has punished some conservative lawmakers by yanking them off choice committees. The rest have been told they are being watched. This is preparatory to another fold on raising the debt limit and taxes.

But what can they do about it? Nothing. Not a thing. D.C.s ruling class has obtained "escape velocity" from grass roots activists. Politicians who play ball with the big-government system will get protection from their party, cover from the media, and funding from the global corporations which have purchased what was formerly your federal government. It's not even American money that's buying these elections anymore. Oh, an outsider may win an open seat once in a while, but the kind of treatment Boehner just handed out is only a taste of what they can expect unless they "grow in office" and start playing ball.

In the unholy trinity of disenfranchisement we have a corporate media which not only fails to cover the stories that matter, but actually attacks independent voices which raise concerns outside a narrow range of political dialogue our masters have deemed acceptable. They won't do the hard work of asking the tough questions and instead savage and dismiss those who do.

The other branch of the trinity are political parties which greatly facilitate centralized control. I have come to the conclusion that all legislators should be elected without a party label. No man can serve two masters. They either answer to their party, or they answer to their constituents.

When the president or governor is of their party, they don't even need constituents because they get their marching orders from the titular head of their party. This is the exact opposite of the Founders intent, where the legislature, closest to the people and with power most dispersed, was to make the laws. The executive branch was only there to execute the laws that the legislative branch made. Now we have them passing 3,000 page bills none of them have read that were drafted by Executive Branch toadies. Heck, the bills are even known by the name of the Executive now (Obamacare). I can remember when bills were named after legislative branch members.

There is no "taking back" either of these two parties. People have been trying that for decades now, and the situation is worse than it ever was and will continue to get worse because these parties have become entities with a life of their own that don't need grassroots activists. All they need is a small cadre who gets crumbs of loot from the table in order to present the bare illusion of legitimacy to the mis-informed masses. They don't need you for money. They don't need you for legitimacy. The media, owned by the same corporate masters they are serving, will give them that.

Look, maybe some of you are not Ron Paul fans, but what happened to his supporters is instructive for anyone who thinks they can take back the party. The establishment cadre's resorted to fraud, cheating, and outright physical violence against Paul supporters when they got too close to taking over the state party.

In Louisiana the establishment forces illegally changed the rules at the last minute so that no matter what the delegates wanted, the outcomes were pre-determined by the insiders. When the Paul people simple turned their chairs around and held their own convention (because the establishment guy would not yield the floor or follow the rules) some rent-a-cops came in and broke one Paul delegate's fingers and dislocated the prosthetic hip of another one. See the video for yourself here.

But Louisiana politics are known for being dirty, right? True, but other sorts of outrages are occurring whenever the establishment guys don't get their way. In Nevada, Romney supporters had hundreds of fake badges made and tried to flood the convention floor. When the Paul folks called for credentialing, they vanished at the first break. The Paul folks took over the Nevada GOP, so the national GOP just collaborated with Romney to start a shadow party in that state and shut out the legitimate state GOP. On their way out, the shills transferred all of the state party's money to a local GOP group still safely in their control.

Paul folks took over the Iowa GOP and not only did the party money spigots turn off, but their Republican Governor suggested that the time had passed for their famous straw poll. Can you imagine the titular head of the party suggesting ending a straw poll that brought the state party so much money and attention over the years? Look for the national GOP to move Iowa back in the pecking order if they can't toss out the Paulians and re-install their compliant shills. They need someone "reliable" counting those votes for the next straw poll!

Paul, with millions of fanatical supporters and millions of dollars, is just the latest failure in the effort to "take back" the Republican party. Those of his supporters which can be co-opted with flattery and promises of "influence" will be co-opted. Those who won't play ball will be back-stabbed and marginalized. If worse comes to worse, the national party will simply do what they did in Nevada during the Romney campaign- do business through the cadre of shills who lost control of the state party and make them the defacto Republican party during the election cycle.

You cannot win in a contest where the other side makes the rules, changes the rules in the middle of the game, and if they lose according to those rules they simply ignore them and bull doze over you anyway. The moral decision is to quit the game and denounce it for the obvious fraud it is, not compromise yourself to a system you know is corrupt in hopes of somehow gaining "influence". You have as much chance joining the Gambinos in the hope of "reforming" and "taking them back" for any moral purpose.

If you just want a piece of the pie for yourself, they might deal with you - if you can help them get more pie. But if you are there to seriously suggest that they get all of their dirty little fingers out of the pie that is the wealth and earnings of the American people then the wolves will mark you as one of the enemy. Only posers, who claim they stand for such positions but do not follow with action, are kept around by the establishment just in case they need to fool people one more time.

If we could somehow abolish political party candidates for all legislative offices we might have a chance of getting our government back again because then the masters would have to buy each candidate individually instead of buying a party apparatus which leverages their purchases. Even better, increase the number of congressmen to ten times the number we currently have(at the founding we had a congressman for ever 50K citizens) and ban parties from sponsoring legislative candidates. That would make that once august body too hard to buy off, and much easier for a group of determined grassroots activists to take back. Let's remember this for America 2.0, when we have to reboot because these rapacious incompetents have run America 1.0 into the ground.