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It's little wonder that democracy is in a state of decline and that faith in our public institutions is at an all time low when government can be so easily corr
by hilbert42 6y ago
It's little wonder that democracy is in a state of decline and that faith in our public institutions is at an all time low when government can be so easily corrupted by disingenuous carpetbaggers such as Intuit. It's not as if this corruption of process by Intuit is an isolated instance, the trouble is that it's commonplace.
It seems to me that the first step in citizens reclaiming their democracy back and having our faith and integrity restored in our institutions is to take charge of the lobbying process and rescue it from corporate interests and other bad influences. I would go so far as to suggest all lobbying of politicians be done in public and that to bypass the system of public scrutiny be made a felony.
This may sound like highfalutin idealism and overkill but after what we've witnessed in Washington in recent weeks we
can no longer ignore the fact that trust in our governance is at an alltime low - and that as citizens we have a collective responsibility to ensure we fix the problem.
We have to break the nexus of mistrust between the Citizenry and Government and desperate times call for desperate measures.
- tehjoker 6y agoJust a tangential historical note: the carpetbaggers were the good guys. They went from the North to the defeated Confederacy to take advantage of the votes of newly freed slaves. The acquired such disdain for precisely that reason. https://www.britannica.com/topic/carpetbagger https://www.britannica.com/topic/carpetbagger
- hilbert42 6y agoRight, like so many other things these days, the term has been corrupted. Guilty as changed. ;-)
- hilbert42 6y agoDuh! I meant 'as charged' (damn edit doesn't stay active long enough).
- fastball 6y agoI'm not sure "good guys" is correct. They went seeking to further their own fortunes (whether financial or political), which is mostly amoral – you can increase your own fortune by collaborating with others but you can also increase your fortune by taking advantage of others. I think the carpetbagger comparison is rather apropos. In the same way as carpetbaggers, you can be a lobbyist who genuinely suggests things that are good for the American people and also are good for the corporate interests you represent. Alternatively you can lobby for things which benefit your corporate interests at the expense of the American people. Unfortunately seems like lobbying in the US is almost entirely the latter. And maybe postbellum carpetbaggers were in fact more of the former. But it's a similar scenario.
- monocasa 6y agoThey weren't the good guys. They ate up ridiculous amounts of reconstruction money meant for southerners, and the south didn't truly recover for a century. There were other reasons too, but the carpetbaggers were among them. They were the civil war's equivalent of Haliburton in Iraq.
- tehjoker 6y agoCan you point me to a reference? I don't know a tremendous amount about this.