By DON FOY | La Farge
President Eisenhower famously warned America of an emerging “military-industrial complex.” Today we have an even bigger, more corrupt “government-industrial complex.” This is a system whereby legislators, judges, and executives are legally bribed with huge campaign donations, and they repay those donors by passing legislation the donors want. The government is the pen, and large corporations and their lobbyists wield it. This process does not often result in the best interests of us, the citizens.
Bothe Democrats and Republicans have participated in this corruption, but in recent years, Republicans on the state and national level have really committed to it and abandoned ethics in favor of money. The Republicans fight campaign-finance reform, and expand the amounts and kinds of donations campaigns can accept. They don’t enforce regulations meant to keep us safe. They’ve entrenched themselves by disenfranchising certain voters; they’ve devised (in secret) contorted legislative maps that isolate their opponents into fewer districts. They’ve used sudden, late-night legislation to avoid public scrutiny. In Wisconsin, the Republican-dominated legislature wanted to trim the authority of the governor to achieve “balance”; however, they waited through eight years of a Republican governorship, and acted only at the last minute, after a Democrat got elected.
The Republican rationalization for all of these underhanded tricks is to create jobs and lower taxes, but I don’t see any wave of prosperity lifting Americans. And taxes are already substantially lower than in the days of President Eisenhower, and we have the cut services to prove it.