Journalist Bill Moyers knows full well what it is that The Gadfly is referring to when The Gadfly talks about the inherent danger to democracy if capitalism is left to it's own, unfettered devices:
The historian Plutarch warned us long ago of what happens when there is no brake on the power of great wealth to subvert the electorate. “The abuse of buying and selling votes,” he wrote of Rome, “crept in and money began to play an important part in determining elections. Later on, this process of corruption spread in the law courts and to the army, and finally, when even the sword became enslaved by the power of gold, the republic was subjected to the rule of emperors.”
We don’t have emperors yet, but we do have the Roberts Court that consistently privileges the donor class.
We don’t have emperors yet, but we do have a Senate in which, as a study by the political scientist Larry Bartels reveals, “Senators appear to be considerably more responsive to the opinions of affluent constituents than to the opinions of middle-class constituents, while the opinions of constituents in the bottom third of the income distribution have no apparent statistical effect on their senators’ roll call votes.”
We don’t have emperors yet, but we have a House of Representatives controlled by the far right that is now nourished by streams of “dark money” unleashed thanks to the gift bestowed on the rich by the Supreme Court in the Citizens United case.
We don’t have emperors yet, but one of our two major parties is now dominated by radicals engaged in a crusade of voter suppression aimed at the elderly, the young, minorities, and the poor; while the other party, once the champion of everyday working people, has been so enfeebled by its own collaboration with the donor class that it offers only token resistance to the forces that have demoralized everyday Americans.
Writing in the Guardian recently, the social critic George Monbiot commented,
"So I don’t blame people for giving up on politics… When a state-corporate nexus of power has bypassed democracy and made a mockery of the voting process, when an unreformed political system ensures that parties can be bought and sold, when politicians [of the main parties] stand and watch as public services are divvied up by a grubby cabal of privateers, what is left of this system that inspires us to participate?"
Why are record numbers of Americans on food stamps? Because record numbers of Americans are in poverty. Why are people falling through the cracks? Because there are cracks to fall through. It is simply astonishing that in this rich nation more than 21 million Americans are still in need of full-time work, many of them running out of jobless benefits, while our financial class pockets record profits, spends lavishly on campaigns to secure a political order that serves its own interests, and demands that our political class push for further austerity. Meanwhile, roughly 46 million Americans live at or below the poverty line and, with the exception of Romania, no developed country has a higher percent of kids in poverty than we do.http://www.salon.com/2013/12/12/bill_moyers_we_are_this_close_to_losing_our_democracy/
Plutarch, the Roman historian, had a front row seat to watching his people's empire steadily deteriorate, and eventually fail spectacularly, under the self-inflicted burden of nationalistic hubris, plutocratic greed and corruption of the political infrastructure, and a willful dereliction of the duty to ensure that the social health, welfare and economic well-being of all of it's people is administered equitably.
The Gadfly is of the resigned belief that America is in dire need of a modern-day Plutarch who can gruffly grab the elites by their starched white collars and shake enough sense in to them such that they mend their ways and thus avoid a similar fate as those in the Roman Empire of Plutarch's time.
Then again, perhaps that is what this country needs -- to fail spectacularly -- and endure a period of great national suffering. Just remember though - fate is pretty fickle when it deals out the ultimate consequences to nation states that have gone astray of the task of bettering the human experience.
Time to enroll the leaders of this country in some remedial history lessons if you ask The Gadfly's humble opinion.
----TFG
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