Another nail in the coffin of American democracy

I'm talking about this. Our governments have just been sold to the highest bidder.

It's time to call a constitutional convention. We need parliamentary government with a president who presides, a prime minister who governs, and elections that allow a wider spectrum of choices.

If this isn't done, I believe we'll have a dictatorship in a few years.

The stresses of hard times

Were American politics this nasty during the Great Depression? I know they included the authoritarian populism of Louisiana's Huey Long, whom my father, who remembers him, describes as the closest thing to a fascist the United States has ever seen. And I know that Franklin Roosevelt had people who positively hated him; my Massachusetts grandfather was one such. There were right-wing demagogues on the radio then as now, such as Father Charles Coughlin.

But in 1933 there was no Homeland Security apparatus, no Blackwater, and only a tiny army. There was no one with a vested interest in war, and with memories of World War I still fresh, no one would have supported anything like our occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan, which resemble nothing so much as Mussolini's invasion of Ethiopia and the Japanese conquest of Manchuria.

Indeed, the United States of today, with its immense and politically influential military-industrial complex and an interventionist clique that wields power out of proportion to its numbers, seems more like militarist Japan than the America of 1933.

Japan was never truly fascist in the German or Italian sense; it had no Hitler and no Nazi party, and there were sharp divisions among its ruling factions -- between Army and Navy, between the military and the zaibatsu, between the "strike north" party, including the Kwantung army in Manchuria, who wanted to attack the Soviet Union, and the "strike south" group who favored war with Britain and the Netherlands. The Kwantung army, acting without orders from Tokyo, tried to settle the argument in 1938 by invading Soviet-protected Mongolia, and was soundly defeated by an obscure Russian general named Zhukov, afterwards famous. And so "strike south" became the order of the day, and a Harvard alumnus who had argued strenuously against it was sent to destroy the American fleet at Pearl Harbor.

The rulers of Japan worked behind the scenes, acting in the name of their figurehead emperor. I have to wonder to what extent President Obama is calling the shots in Washington and to what extent the same shadowy figures who pulled the strings behind George W. Bush continue to do so today.

To what extent does our government function as advertised? Does it really matter what faction controls one or another house of Congress? Do we live in a functioning democracy or in some Greater North American Co-Prosperity Sphere? And is there any way to get rid of the corruption and regain some semblance of responsible government, short of losing a world war to the Chinese?

I want that constitutional convention. Badly.