Unaccountable U.S. Government Agencies

Chris Hedges: Maintaining US Empire is bipartisan ~ RT America

By now, a growing number of Americans have become aware of how our intended democracy has become undermined by Big Money and turned into a sham where voter participation is essentially blocked by a twin party tyranny of the R- and D-Party, both working exclusively for the rich and their corporations, think tanks, and an army of 42,000+ registered lobbyists (plus many more unregistered ones) while dangling billionaire puppets in front of us as “our” candidates, excluding true people’s representatives from our ballots or rigging the elections when one does make it on the ballots. Some of us fight for honest candidates or try to take over one of these corrupt major parties from within (always failed, so far), fight for a new party that really represents us, or are even awake enough to fight against the massive election fraud committed by both major parties.

But an issue still often overlooked or smeared as “conspiracy theories” is an evil bureaucracy that also rules us, commits crimes in our name, and is unaccountable because even when we do manage to elect trustworthy representatives into Congress or the White House (or state and local governments), our various bureaucratic institutions are kingdoms of their own whose bosses are not elected, at best appointed by elected officials, but even then generally independent from those as these bureaucratic bosses have no term limits while our elected officials do. And even when the very top bosses are replaced by elected officials, they tend to be or later become lobbyists for the corporations they should regulate rather than serve, so they benefit from term limits and are even more reliably driven into the control by billionaires and their corporations – rather than being restrained by term limits – just like our term limited elected officials. (One reason why term limits aren’t really helpful to democracy, which makes the recent smear of Bolivia’s elected president as a “dictator” because he didn’t accept unconstitutional term limits in Bolivia a bit ironic — and sad, of course, when one looks at the violent mass murders and threats committed by his “political” opposition that is running a racist and fascist coup with support or even organized by OUR unaccountable bureaucratic bosses). 

It’s almost funny: “conservatives” and “libertarians” have long complained about our bureaucracy, but many have turned a blind eye to some of the crimes committed by it, especially the foreign policy crimes of war and regime change coups, death squads, torture, extortion, non-due-process-incarcerations, blackmail, and bombing of civilian populations (mostly by the CIA and our military, specialized institutions like the “Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation” (WHINSEC, formerly known as the “School of the Americas” (SOA), or transnational institutions like the IMF which even more easily can evade democratic accountability by not being linked at all to national voters, just like transnational corporations who by and large rule us all by now, even in the U.S.). Meanwhile, people on the “left” often complained about those crimes (though less and less in more recent decades) but apparently tended to turn a blind eye to the underlying problem of an unaccountable bureaucracy, something often referred to by allegedly weird “conspiracy theorists” as Deep State, Shadow Government, or Invisible State. Well, perhaps we should shed these red button issues implanted in our heads and reach out across the “left” and “right” divide to agree upon a true democracy where we, the people, would make the important decisions and our representatives (including those bureaucrats sitting cozily in our institutions) could be held fully accountable by us.

Placed at the top is a short video interviewing Chris Hedges that inspired today’s article and adds some spice.

Other issues with unaccountable bureaucrats are police brutality, a growing police state, complicated unfair taxes, and the troubles with bureaucratically ruled social safety nets where means testing, race testing, and similar BS denies rightful benefits to suffering people, delays them too long, or makes them too complicated or completely impossible to apply for (say, if you are too handicapped to deal with the paper war and office visits)… This unwise form of a social safety net also divides us, the people, against each other when so many feel left out, squeezed on behalf of others, and so on. It’s why I always argue for much simpler systems of universal benefits and uncomplicated but hard to evade restrictions, things like: (1) A citizens dividend (UBI) instead of approved-or-denied welfare/unemployment insurance benefits/etc. to give us all a secure, undeniable fair slice of our economy (that we all contribute to throughout our lives, after all) and where money we earn through work only goes on top of the already secured basic life. (2) Medicare for All, rather than wrestling with profit-seeking private health insurances that deny benefits and are given or denied by employers or bureaucrats at their whim. (3) Free education, so we can all learn what we need to participate productively (and democratically!!!) in modern civilization; and so on… all financed by, and combined with a cap-tax on excessive wealth and income of the rich, like a speed limit on excessive wealth-taking, in order to remove huge inequality, an unscrupulous uncaring ruling class and Big Money from politics.

Why do, so I heard, 20% of Americans by now despise democracy? Because they mistake our current fake democracy with real democracy, I suspect. We, the people, need to fully wake up and make real change happen that is profound going all the way down to the roots of our problems.

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