Capital Times Excerpt:But in all well-deserved respect due to McCabe and his sharply tuned perspective, its not enough for us to put only state and federal officials under the microscope or to follow the money. If I may add here, residents must stand up and shout out against misguided policies and decisions made at the local levels and look for, and uncover the links of influence just as well.
The crooked game that is the problem behind every problem plaguing our state and our nation will end when ordinary folks take government and politics as seriously as do the richest and most privileged in our society, who have tirelessly gamed the system and warped government decisions in their favor.
Of the problems behind every problem, the biggest one of all is how so many of us have backed away from democracy. I suspect one culprit is how we've all been taught -- brainwashed, really -- from a very early age to be consumers first and foremost, not citizens.
When all of us become more than the sum of what we buy, we'll have our democracy and our country back.
Sometimes, a money exchange may never happen or be recorded. Oftentimes personal friendships and a feckless and defanged media accomplice are all that is necessary to tilt the tables against justice or cover up the truth. More often then not, many decisions in our local political environment are arrived at to advance friends, business clients and associates, or private special interests flying under the "community" banner. All the signs of a corrupted local government can be exposed by following these connections of influence.
Other officials involved in making the connection just go along to get along, never understanding the scope of the damage done by their complacency. Understandably, for still others, opposing misguided local officials is too close for comfort in a small community and they don't want to be maligned in a campaign by the supporting media partner.
We must stop kidding ourselves. The political environment in Janesville is tilted as anywhere else in America. We just don't read or hear about it because its been "cleaned up" by the compliant monopolized local media. We have been brainwashed.
Read McCabe's timeless Earth Day Speech delivered on the University of Wisconsin-Madison campus April 22, 2003 here.
Keeping in tradition, the Janesville Gazette posted McCabe's op-ed on Tuesday (May 5) under the heading "State Views."
2 comments:
While Mike McCabe makes some good points, he is tilted in one political direction just as much as those he criticizes. That subverts his own credability just as your one sided views tend to discredit you. On several occassions I contacted him to point out specific examples of the same time of abuse by liberal groups that he was exposing in conservative groups. He replied that "that is different" and brushed it off. Once again it is tough being a active moderate.,
I agree with you up to a point. I don't know of any governmental watchdog group or policy think tank that is not driven by some philosophical reasoning rooted in a political ideology. But it doesn't mean they're partisan, it just means they're run by humans. With that said, here's where I differ. I don't care to waste time debating an important issue by first qualifying the credibility of the participants by their partisanship. Tables are tilted by cronyism, influence and money regardless of the platform. McCabe's op-ed and my additional take on it contains no reference to Left or Right, Democrat or Republican. They are all part of this political culture.
The easiest way to undermine or dismiss the message is to discredit the messenger.
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