The Threat

I’m somewhat bemused by my blog posts lately. I didn’t start this blog to comment primarily on government and politics. What got me started was just the general stupidity and hypocrisy I kept stumbling over pretty much wherever I went.

Most of it was simply the result of carelessness or the lack of thinking and effort that went into providing services and almost all of it was easily preventable. 

I encountered it in retail stores, banks, technology, the mainstream media and even in trying to figure out why the instructions to assemble a barbeque had to be so complicated. 

But I have discovered over the past few months that increasingly I am writing about politics and government and I’ve come to realize that it is because politicians specifically, and governments in general, have elevated stupidity and hypocrisy to a level that takes my breath away.

 I honestly believe that there is more hypocrisy and sheer stupidity in politics and government these days that in all other areas of society combined. In fact, I have come to consider our own democratic governments to be a greater threat to our well-being and security, if not our sanity, than terrorism, war and economic collapse. I believe that it is our own governments who are primarily responsible for these things.

Terrorism has been with us for a long time, it isn’t something new.

Britain was under constant attack by the IRA for decades. People were shot. Bombs were exploded in public venues and thousands died.  Japan experienced a horrifying attack in their subway system from a terrorist group who released seron gas and countries like Germany, France, Israel and even staid, old Canada experienced a terrorist attack, that resulted in the imposition of marital law, long before 9/11. 

Terrorism is not new and it is not the sole purview of Islamic extremists.

Terrorist organizations like the IRA, The Badher-Meinfhof Gang, The Red Brigade, The Weather Underground, Black September and the FLQ maimed and murdered thousands over the years. The shooting last year in Norway was not by an Islamic terrorist but by a Norwegian striking out with the same bizarre rationale it seems that is used by all terrorists and it resulted in the shooting of more than 70 young people.

Terrorists have attacked at the Olympics, airplanes, buildings, markets and a thousand other venues in countries on every major continent. Each terrorist group lays claim to some extreme political grievance but their actions always includes the random targeting and killing of innocents. Terrorists are cowards and fanatics who strike from the shadows and their objective is to create fear through viscious violent acts. Nations that succumb to that fear lose to the terrorists by giving them exactly what they set out to achieve.

Fighting terrorism is a difficult challenge but our governments have never figured out the root causes of it or how to combat it effectively despite having more intelligence, financial and military resources at their disposal than all of the terrorist cells combined.

I blame terrorists for the bloodshed and our governments for their inability to come together in a common cause against this threat. I blame our governments for implementing international policies that have raped natural resources of other nations and supported oppressive regimes in exchange for a stable supply of oil. In the end this has only provided fertile ground for extremists to capitalize on the suppression of the rights of people living within those regimes to justify their actions and to recruit new members.

Our governments still don’t get it and the best they can offer is bluster, military adventures and laws to strip away the rights of their own citizens in their fight to curb terrorism. I would suggest that the solution to terrorism does not lie in making everyone, citizen and terrorist alike, a prisoner of oppressive government control. It lies in not allowing terrorism to cause a nation to violate its own way of life, laws and constitution out of fear. When that happens, we not only lose some of our freedom we also enable and encourage terrorists to continue their bloody acts.

We have reached a stage where our governments have clearly sent a message to terrorists that we are afraid and that the actions of a few can successfully cause even great nations to tremble and subsequently undermine its laws and values.

It’s the same with the economy. For decades, governments have used national economies as personal checkbooks to ensure re-election and as bottomless wells from which they could draw whatever they needed whenever they wished.  There was never concern for the future or even for ensuring that all core services, like infrastructure maintenance,  were adequately funded.

They have treated taxpayers as nothing more than a conduit to get elected and as an endless source for more tax revenue. They have raised funds for their political parties and their election campaigns by pandering to special interest with taxpayer money. This included entitlements, and tax breaks to various sectors of society including both unions and corporations.

There was never enough money to end child abuse or eradicate poverty but always enough money to buy a few more votes.

Government has brought a level of complexity to things like the tax system which is not only expensive but just plain absurd. If we were starting from scratch, nobody in their right mind would design government the way it operates today.

And all of that has successfully brought our global economy to its knees. 

National priorities change more often than the score at a basketball game and teenage girls on their smart phones have longer attention spans than most of what passes for political leadership these days. There is no continuity, no vision, no long-term strategy. There is only continual bickering, arguing, pandering and squandering with the odd G8 or G20 meeting thrown in to give the current political leadership the opportunity to at least appear as if it knows what it is doing. 

In the end the faces may change from time to time but the downward spiral continues.

And then there is war.

What confuses me is the take-no-prisoners attitude politicians bring to political campaigns and the tepid way they engage us in wars. They often creep into conflict backwards and usually for every reason except doing what is moral, what is right and without clear defined objectives. 

Once they have embroiled us in a war, they spend money like Bill Gates was personally prepared to underwrite the cost and make decisions that inevitably turn out to be non-decisions that only increase the cost in terms of money and human suffering.

Desert Storm was a brilliant military campaign that politicians stopped short of allowing the military to overthrow the Iraqi regime. The result was ten more years of bloodshed and tyranny in Iraq, including the use of chemical weapons by the defeated Hussein regime that killed more than 10,000 Kurds and the arrest, torture and murder of hundreds of innocent Iraqis. This contributed to the rise of radical Islamist and a second war in Iraq, and is part of the reason for the ongoing terrorism and political instability we’re now experiencing.

Western democracies rushed into Libya to protect the innocent and have stood by impotently as more than 20,000 Syrian men, women and children have been slaughtered in a brutal civil war and there seems to still be no end in sight for the Afghanistan conflict.

Our politicians recognize that the United Nations has become a waste of time and has been overrun by oppressive regimes that are a threat to global peace and security and yet, they continue to support this cumbersome, hypocritical and pointless organization as if it there was still some merit in doing so.

It has come to a point where there is a widening disconnect between what the people in democracies believe their countries stand for and what their governments are actually doing. Democratically elected governments have run up obscene levels of debt, curtailed the rights of their own citizens and have violated their nations’ laws and constitutions in the bizarre belief that it will protect the very principles upon which they were founded.

I believe that it is this that is the single biggest threat to democracy and that the demand by special interest for continuing but unaffordable entitlements and privilege that is the second.

Integrity was one of the first casualties of democratic governments. Politicians mislead, waffle and sometimes just outright lie. Government has developed a language so arcane and confusing nobody understands what they’re talking about including the bureaucracy itself at times.

Greed, pandering  and expediency have replaced vision, courage and leadership.

Elections have become absurdly expensive but ultimately meaningless exercises.  Politicians talk the talk during election campaigns but do not walk the talk once they are in office. There is little difference between the foreign and security policies of George Bush and Barrack Obama. It was a Republican president that opened Guantanamo and it was a Democratic president who kept it open after campaigning on closing it. 

It is the same in other democracies. Talk is cheap and makes for good news stories during the election campaign but once the election is over, it is increasingly difficult to tell the new government from the previous one. In Canada, the Liberal government entered into an agreement to purchase F-35 jets and the Conservatives in opposition criticized the decision. Once elected, the new Conservative government continues the procurement of the F-35 and the Liberals, now in opposition criticize the decision.

My three year old grandson has more common sense.

It isn’t governing, it’s a game. It isn’t about what is best for the people of a nation, it’s about what is best for politicians and for those who help get or keep them elected. Governing is incidental. Winning and holding on to power is everything.

In the end, we all lose. We lose our security, our economic freedom, our rights are curtailed and our constitutions and laws undermined. It is our own governments that are undermining our way of life, not the threat of terrorism or economic recession. Those are the result of inefficient and even corrupt government and they become the excuses politicians use to justify their inability to govern effectively.

Corporations start to fail as the result of greed and stupidity, no problem. Politicians throw tax payer money and tax breaks at them. Union jobs are threatened, no problem Politicians throw some tax revenue to the companies that hire union workers to save their jobs. Farmers who didn't buy crop insurance and who are facing a drought or other natural disaster look to government for help. No problem, there is still some taxpayer money to toss their way.

In the end, it is clear to me that increasingly, our governments have lost sight of the fact that democracy is government by the people for the people and that those in government not only represent us, they work for us. They are not there to rule us, manipulate us, dictate how we should live our lives or protect us from the choices we make. Their job pure and simple is to manage our common resources, administer our system of laws, maintain our infrastructure and to ensure that we have a robust national defense in case of external threat. 

They are failing in every area. The economic blunders are painfully obvious, the misuse of taxpayer money so blatant even store window dummies roll their eyes and the finger pointing and excuse making is as much a part of the political jargon now as it is pointless. 

It is not up to government to decide how we should live our lives. Their role is not to govern us but to govern ‘for’ us. We are quite capable of living our own lives without supervision….well….most of us anyway. We don’t need nanny states with governments acting as surrogate parents or guardians.

It serves little useful purpose to throw off the chains of monarchies, dictatorships and theocracies in favour of government by the people for the people if those we eventually elect only end up acting in the same manner as the leaders of totalitarian regimes.

In the end, even in a democracy there is no such thing as benign government. 

The more government there is, the more it meddles, it interferes and it corrupts. Government does not create jobs, the private sector creates jobs. It does not manage the economy, it is a drain on the economy and it does not provide more freedom, it curtails freedoms with rules and laws and taxes and a constant barrage of regulations that intrude on the rights of citizens to live their lives as they see fit.

It isn’t difficult to understand how this happens in a democracy. There is no standard or qualification required for politics beyond the ability to raise money and get elected. Politicians come from all walks of life and almost none have the prerequisite experience to manage something on the scale of a nation. Apple wouldn’t consider for a moment turning over the running of its corporation to a handful of recently elected former teachers, lawyers and farmers but we do it when we elect our governments and what we turn over to them is much larger and more complex than most corporations.

We demand nothing from them other than charisma, a few promises we know in our hearts they won't keep and the right words to reassure us that everything will be just fine. We care less about what a politician stands for than what bad things they say the other guy stands for. We don't evaluate a political leader on their record, we cling to ideology like a hungry fat kid clings to Twinkie.

In that regard, we are the author’s of our own misfortune and are as much responsible for the mess we now endure. 

It occurs to me at times that we put more thought into selecting our new car than we do into choosing which politicians or political party should be entrusted with the fate of our nations. But then, these days most cars seem to be far more efficient than any government or political party.

The real tragedy is that these days it is easier to find an honest used car salesperson than an honest politician. 

© 2012 Maggie's Bear

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