(Revised Version) A Political Revolution IS the Pragmatic Course When the System is Rigged

A earlier version was posted here a couple of days ago for a short time. This is the revised and edited version that was featured on the Daily Kos Recommended List for most of a day:


By definition, a rigged system predetermines certain outcomes, that's what “rigging” means. The near constant and massive transfer of wealth from the middle and working classes to the wealthiest one percent of Americans over the last thirty five years is evidence of just that. The system our constitution attempted to enshrine once was deemed revolutionary, with populist forces carefully balanced by institutional checks and balances. Increasingly what remains of the latter are large campaign contribution checks drawn off fattened corporate balance sheets. Elections and recessions come and go, income inequality only rises. With corruption embedded in the software of democracy there is seldom the need for overt bribery. That's why searching for instances of specific quid pro quos can be fundamentally misleading.

There's little need to micro manage each politicians every move in a crooked game. When the overall system is rigged then no one vote is critical. Much like casinos in Las Vegas with their myriad slot machines, Wall Street and associates don't have to control the pull of every lever, the fix runs deeper than that. At the end of each session of Congress the oligarchy come out ahead, always taking in more than they pay out. Year in and year out the return on their investments may vary, but the trend line never does. The men and women who cast their votes in Congress know which side their bread is buttered on, and where big pay checks will await them whenever they finally leave office – by choice or by defeat - unless they bit the hands that fed them.

Confining efforts to alter the current status quo to parliamentary maneuvers inside a fraudulent political system is tantamount to a concession speech . A rigged system is the classic closed loop, if left to run indefinitely without outside interference there is no mechanism to change it's course. Faced with an entrenched self perpetuating machine, attempting to disable it with the tools closest at hand is not a practical approach, not if that’s a set of phillips head screwdrivers when what’s needed is a fleet of bulldozers.

It doesn't matter how skilled a technician is, how experienced, how tenacious, or how passionately committed to eventually getting the job done she may be, if the tools that can be wielded by an individual alone pale before the task at hand. The leverage simply does not exist inside of a rigged system to alter the course that it's on. The status quo is not set up to change the status quo. Something new must intercede to counteract governing inertia, and that by nature is revolutionary.

No prescription for political change is pragmatic that doesn’t recognize the dimensions of the task at hand and embrace a viable strategy to win meaningful results. The course of least resistance offers the least resistance for a reason – the path less heavily defended seldom leads one to the core. Once again we find ourselves in a Presidential election year, and the standard course of least resistance is being advocated for again: Look for a highly skilled champion and elect that person President.

I acknowledge that Hillary Clinton is among the more astute political inside players I have witnessed in my lifetime, and clearly she possesses great personal abilities. Her heart I believe is in the right place. Her campaign message in essence comes down to “I can and will fight hard for you - It's OK, I've got this.”

But even if Hillary were Super Woman, she can not manage this alone – not even with Bill at her side. It will take more than a very strong woman to reverse the effects of a system that's long been rigged against the overwhelming majority of Americans. It will take more than a village. It will take a full fledged movement.

Bernie Sanders gets that. He gets it emotionally, he gets it intellectually, and he gets it strategically. That is how he got there, standing alone on a debate stage beside Hillary Clinton, seen as a serious contender to become our next President. Sanders couldn't get there alone. He knew that and he planned accordingly.

Bernie counted on a large movement to support him reaching this point: to fund him with small donations, to organize at the grass roots level below the radar of establishment politics, and to break through the media embargo placed around his populist message through millions of tweets and posts, through viral videos shared and through word of mouth. Bernie Sanders has demonstrated that he knows how to take on a system rigged against him/us with his integrity fully intact, beholden to no one but the people on whose behalf he is running, counting on the public to have his back, not just the other way around.

In 2010, two years after the Great Recession struck our nation down, while tens of millions were still suffering from it, talk in our nation's capital centered largely on deficit reduction. Conventional wisdom then held that entitlement spending needed to be reined in, and that cost of living increases for Social Security recipients had to be recalculated because they were too generous as they were. Debates weren't ongoing over how much to expand “food stamp” relief for the hungry, they were over how deeply that should be “trimmed” instead. Simultaneously, temporary tax cuts on the first several hundred thousands of dollars a year that the wealthy earned were not allowed to lapse, they were made permanent instead. Income inequality wasn't high on the national agenda, and the media and our politicians rarely mentioned it before the Occupy Wall Street movement seized our public squares with their prolonged encampments.

In a similar vein repeated lethal police shootings of unarmed predominantly minority citizens never elicited much in the way sustained public attention - outside of minority communities - until the Black Lives Matter movement took to the streets and refused to be silenced. This is nothing new to anyone who has studied the role that movements play in transforming our nation, when the establishment starts out hell bent on not changing; from the Labor movement to the Woman’s Suffrage Movement, to the Civil Rights Movement, to the Anti War and Environmental movements and more.

If you believe that what's needed to undo the damage caused by our rigged economic and political system is to install a strong experienced and dedicated woman as our next President – then Hillary Clinton may have the skill set you are looking for. If instead you believe that it will take a strong and sustained movement that will not disband after election day to change what is wrong with America, then Bernie Sanders has the demonstrated skill set needed to mobilize and engage one for that effort. Failure is never the pragmatic choice, no matter how incremental it may be. It all comes down to a simple question: What will it really take to finally turn things around?