The Census and The Senate

 

Until the ballots were counted, few Americans paid any serious attention to the last presidential election. Now that the campaign is long over, they are all ears. The brutal battle over the White House was just distracting background noise until they started probing chads and pardons. The two big party candidates finally came up with an issue on which they visibly disagreed. And America tuned in.

The election that was ignored by the majority of Americans was a major concern to certain influential citizens; enough of a concern that they felt obliged to pony up three billion dollars worth of political contributions.

At the top of the list of contributors to the Democratic Party, four were from the communication industry and four were American Jews. Two were Israeli-born. This information is readily available to any journalist who has access to the Internet. A visit to MotherJones.com will enlighten the most gullible citizen about the nature of power in America. Their most recent issue includes a list of the MoJo 400, a list of the four hundred biggest individual contributors to the two major parties. It has been set up with some search capablilities that allow browsing the list by party, by state and by industry. It also provides some incredible information about the identity of these political power brokers and what motivates their generosity.

Some of the names on the list are not exactly household names. Haim Saban, David Gilo, S Daniel Abraham and Bernard L Schwartz all made the top five list with donations of over a million dollars to the Democratic Party. Abraham has spent most of his political and charitable energies in the last decade supporting Israel and Haim Saban and David Gilo are both Israeli immigrants. Denise Rich didn’t give enough to make the top ten. She made up for it by making a six-figure donation to Hillary’s campaign and another 400,000 to the Presidential Library.

Democratic party influentials, including 79 donations from finance moguls and 33 from the communication industry, made the largest individual donations. Four hundred lonely Americans who just want to be pampered by their government spent a fortune to get access to our lawmakers and the White House. 147 of these donors were from California and New York, 92 of them Democrats. None hailed from Montana or Nebraska. Many of these contributors were activists from the American Jewish community, actively bidding for politicians in much the same way farmers in Iowa bid for barn animals.

The recent census revealed that one out of three Americans consider themselves non-European. Yet, a brief visit to the United States Senate, leaves one believing that this is a society completely dominated by the European-American chattering classes. The media talks up ‘diversity’ but shuns it like the plague. If you don’t pay, you don’t play. In the current debate over campaign finance reform, Senator Robert Torricelli (D é NJ) pointed out that “campaigns are forced to succumb to price-gouging because they have no other way to effectively communicate with voters”. The rip off artists he was referring to were the lords of the mass media.

Even the “liberal” Democratic Party has proven incapable of producing a single senate seat for an African-American or a Hispanic American. Today, there is not a single African-American or Hispanic-American elected to serve in a statewide office. Not a single governor. Yet the Democratic party never fails to harp on how they represent minorities. Apparently, they believe that minorities should be confined to representation in the “lesser” House.

The Democratic Party has been reduced to a tawdry scam. It has failed to deliver to those without sufficient financial credentials. We have a Senate full of millionaire lawyers trading in public policy like it was their private property. The mainstream media walks around in complete denial of the fact that there is a complete lack of representation for minorities in the most powerful law making body in the world. Naturally, no other industry has a greater stake in owning a stable of loyal and obedient Senators ready to trot in the direction specified by the media titans.

The American Jewish community, representing barely 2% of the population, has eleven Senators to address issues important to their ethnic group. This alone is instructive in demonstrating what political power can deliver. Israelis, with a standard of living as good as Greeks, get thirty cents out of every foreign aid dollar. That is more money than we send to all of Sub-Saharan Africa, devastated by war, famine, AIDS and poverty. Our foreign policy initiatives in the Middle East and at the United Nations are largely framed to suit the interests of Israel.

Israel gets what it wants from Washington, regardless of its behavior. The Israelis can steal native Palestinian lands, kill hundreds of Palestinians, mutilate thousands, cripple a whole third-world economy, and get subsidies from the American government. And not a peep from a single senator. Ariel Sharon, a well-documented war criminal, visits Washington and gets a warm reception in the White House and promises of continued political and military support. In exchange, the American President agrees to not pressure Sharon with any pesky peace initiatives. Oslo? What Oslo?

As for Colin Powell, he did his usual groveling act before AIPAC. Some of the men who personally enriched him must have been in the audience. His contribution: “We will assist and not insist”. Translation: do what you please, just remember to keep those lucrative boardroom chairs warm for me and my boy, who is now over at the FCC. Oh, yes, and thanks for the millions. Any questions? Palestinians? What Palestinians?

The Senate has become an inherently unrepresentative anachronistic political body. Perhaps one House is enough. Let the lords in the Senate find themselves private “whites only clubs” and abandon a political body that has been resilient in resisting the radical changes reflected in the most recent census. As evidenced by their amoral cowardly stand on a number of issues, they have become a useless parliament of whores, incapable of serving anything but their own personal interests.

The Senate stands as the major hub of political corruption in modern America. It is expensive and inefficient. The only virtue is that the hot air produced within Senate chambers saves on the heating bill. If these Senators had a shred of decency, they would immediately move to disband and join the House as equal members. It is an absurdly minimum requirement that our government respect that our most recent ‘census’ is good enough cause to eliminate non-representative institutions. Throw the Senate bums out and turn the joint into a museum. They should have closed the joint when Bob Dole retired. But breaking up old ethnic clubs is hard to do. One last requirement for democracy to prosper in America; dismantle the Democratic Party. It is beyond repair and only serves to impede the emergence of a truly liberal progressive American movement. Considering how this party has squandered its political heritage for the lure of money, it is time to consign it to a pauper’s grave.

Mr. Ahmed Amr is Editor of NileMedia.com in Seattle and a regular contributor to Media Monitors Network (MMN)

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