The Real Debate

I have often said that Bush is just a symptom of a sick society. Frances Moore Lappe tries to start a debate on the real issue:

Democracy’s core premise is the wide dispersion of power so that we all have a voice. But our market economy is driven by another premise. Its driver is one rule –- highest return to existing wealth, those who own corporate stock. With that one rule, economic power concentrates and concentrates…and concentrates until it becomes so powerful that it subverts the political process.
Today 56 lobbyists –- doubling since George Bush took office—walk the halls of Congress for every one person we’ve put there to represent us.
We have been warned of this danger. Thomas Jefferson warned us. Dwight Eisenhower warned us. Most pointedly, Franklin Delano Roosevelt warned us. “[T]he liberty of a democracy is not safe,” he said to Congress in 1938, “if the people tolerate the growth of private power to a point where it becomes stronger than their democratic state itself. That, in its essence, is Fascism…”

Lappe argues that the USA has become a "thin" Democracy, an empty shell needs to be rejuvenated from within before it can live again. Bravo.