By now many people have begun to realize something is terribly wrong with the American political system. The much lauded system of checks and balances between the branches of government has not only seemingly broken down, it has been completely shattered. 

          The President had declared to himself limitless powers in a time of war, redefined war as not needing to be declared conflicts between nations or ratified by Congress, potentially perpetual, given himself the right to hold people without trials indefinitely, torture people, spy on the public in open defiance of our laws and Constitution, override or ignore any laws passed by Congress he does not like or feels will threaten our “security”, and put forth a principle of a “unitary executive” marginally different at all than advocating a dictatorship. 

           Congress is supposed to stop a President from acting in such a manner. The US Constitution undoubtedly made Congress the most powerful branch of the government solely for the purpose of preventing such potential abuses of executive power, but Congress has completely abdicated any opposition to this because of fear of the President, the Press which has shown unnerving consistency in attacking political opponents of the Administration, and of the secret spying on them they now have begun to suspect was the reason for the Administration's evading the paper trail that would have been generated by using even secret courts to obtain warrants for spying. (Do you think only Greek politicians cell-phones were tapped?) The corruption in Congress also has made it unable to confront such threats, and it is rampant. All attempts at campaign reform and limiting the power of lobbyists is neutered at the source as even those who put forth the reforms limit them only to surface token changes they hope will lead to more meaningful changes one day, only to see even those modest proposals watered down or abandoned altogether. 

           The Courts have become openly politicized and each party attempts to stack them in their favor to make decisions in their favor, not the least of which is election redistricting, probably the most corrupt practice at openly trying to rig elections other than outright voter exclusion, which also has been given court legitimacy now as an effective campaign tool which we are now exporting. 

           One could be cynical and say all of this was inevitable, that the greater power and wealth a country has concentrated all in one place inevitably leads to greater corruption because that becomes its heart and soul, the target for controlling the rest of the body, for it is the government which makes the rules which determine who gets rich and who does not, who keeps their wealth and who must give some of it up for the common good of others. But when the government has to live in a community of nations, it is bound to be expected to live under the same laws it expects other nations to live by, and the US has ceased even doing that. Not only in our commitments we have voluntarily made and are now obligated to obey in how we are supposed to treat other nations, but in our very commitments internationally to follow our own laws on human rights, election fairness, the treatment of our prisoners, and the necessity of our President, military, and internal police forces to adhere to our own rules for their behavior. 

           Below are what I feel are the turning points in how we came to this crisis, the real crisis which our media ignores in favor the crisis' de jour which are given to us daily to keep us occupied, distracted, and fearful of tackling the real problem. That being that our political system has evolved through corruption beyond the public’s ability to greatly influence it at all in any significant way both to its own and to our own peril.
 

Turning point one- The Deregulation of the Gasoline prices

           This is one true fact I believe is key, which others may not call a fact but some nations well know, you either control your energy companies, should you be lucky enough to have your own sources of energy, or they control you. For the nations that have no homegrown energy sources, if they have few people and live in a tropical environment, they may not be as impacted, but without energy sources of their own, for nations with many people, they will have energy needs that will make them dependent upon foreign sources of energy that will inevitably tie the hands of their governments. Once the governments hands are tied and they are forced to capitulate, so too will their military be bound by such dependence and their national integrity and independence will be influenced or compromised as well. Even the military machines need fuel. The economy which feeds the machine needs fuel as much as politicians need to be able to pay bribes to stay in power.

           The US government has known this both sides of this dilemma. It was ironically its own attempts to wrest itself free from such dependence which made it in effect wholly subsidiary and dependent upon its own oil companies with the deregulation of its internal gasoline and oil prices in the hopes that such deregulation would free its oil companies, now international corporations with no obligation to its own home territories best interests, to create new sources of energy within its own borders or in countries whose leaders would always be counted on to sell first options to us, and hopefully at low prices as well.

           But it did not turn out that way. The greater profits for the oil companies simply made them more easily able to influence the government. Where now all the top positions in the US administration are held by former oil company executives may be a bit too visible, the oil companies power has been growing over the country's political system behind the scenes in less publicly visible ways which will remain no matter who is in office. This “Oilgarcy” as some have termed it is entrenched and not about to go away because of any election. It is due not only to a well established system of payoffs to the government through lobbying, but in the geo-strategic notion that he who controls the sources of energy controls in a large part, the world, and our own government long ago decided to outsource our own national interest and even national security to private sources questionably loyal to our own publics interest and economy, and now expects all other nations to do the same. That is no less to give up control of their own political systems, economies, to energy behemoths which we think if not under our own governments control, and they most certainly are not, then it is not as wrong as if we wanted to personally control their economies directly. If our own government is a whore to the forces we created, which may bleed us all dry while our politicians profit from it as much as our previous dictators in Banana Republics did, we think it is not asking too much to demand all other countries to do the same.

           But there are countries which have thought differently and decided years ago to have state control over their own oil fields, and are not energy importers but exporters. These are rich countries which unlike the US actually are rich in resources, not just on paper or in a “service economy” sort of way. The ones which reacquired this control legally by international rules (as our own nation could have if its government had not been a slave to these groups and if it was able to even occassionally contemplate acting in the interest of its public instead of these mega-corporations) have upset the US the most and the US considers that this energy independence by them contributes to or defines our own dependence, in a uni-polar world or not. And that is correct. The US is among other things, the greatest military machine the world has known when combined with the ability to influence foreign governments policies such that one could say the first truly global empire has been created rivaling even the heyday of the British Empire, but it all is dependent upon our access to oil. In a way the US can threaten any country in the world, and lately has been doing that in scores, but threatening to limit our access to their oil beyond our control threatens us, which has been accepted as such by Democrats and Republicans alike. It may be their oil, but if they do not sell it to us or cut us off, to us seemingly, it is our “right” to invade and occupy their countries.

           For whatever unquestioning “patriots” believe about the reasons why the US went to war in Iraq, a few facts remain. The first moment the oil companies literally controlled the highest offices in the country, we targeted a regime which the President recently admitted knowing had no ability to threaten us (but supposedly was seeking the ability to threaten us, someday, though we have real enemies with that ability in spades now), gave many different reasons why Iraq should have be attacked above all others (before and after 9/11) as  our “greatest” threat, even though those reasons went against our own intelligence services reports and military services advice. In other more simpler to understand words, we made a lot of shit up on why we needed to go to war there and exaggerated a non-existent but “potential one day” threat to us to invade another country which had not attacked us, killed tens of thousands of innocent civilians in the process, and began an illegal by international law military occupation that continues to this day to protect oil fields we almost immediately had sold to the same companies which pull the strings of our own government. 

           Had gasoline prices not been deregulated, the oil companies would have been another large industry still able to influence US policy as many other industries do, often to the detriment of the publics interest, but it would not have reached the critical mass to wholly subvert US foreign policy to its own interests first, above the safety and national security as has happened. The greater the tension in the world, the more open warfare, the higher the price of oil, the greater the profits for the oil companies, even if such instability makes the US and its citizens a more prized target of terrorism. Such attacks and threats of attack only reinforces and entrenches the status quo of the balance of power in their favor, even locking it in cement permanently. If the situation were reversed, if the oil companies actually stood to gain more profits from increasing peace in the Middle-East and stood to lose money from invading and occupying Iraq, or from other ongoing and planned invasions and occupations, it world would be dramatically different than how it operates today.
 

Turning Point Two -Repeal of the Fairness in Media Doctrine 
 

 (written in 2006, interupted, unfinished)