Performance of Congress Reaches Point of Complete Breakdown

After months of self induced wasted time on the deficit while ignoring the crucial need for energizing the national economy Congress ended up on Tuesday with a bean counter solution for the national credit ceiling. The market immediately gave us its analysis of the legislation by going into free fall, with the Dow losing over 512 points on Thursday.


On Friday, for the first time in its history, the credit rating of the United States was lowered form AAA to AA+ by Standard and Poor. An explanation of the reasoning shows that the primary basis was the deteriorating legislative performance by the Congress, which after months of pathetic effort came very close to causing a default in the country’s’ credit.

Meanwhile Congress left town and won’t be back until early September!

Thus ended several months of record setting self afflicted elected government incompetency, while millions of Americans remain unemployed, our infrastructure crumbles, and our economy remains broken.

Naturally the citizens are irate at this performance. The latest NY Times/CBS poll shows that 82% of the US population disapproves of the performance of Congress. Everyone I know double disapproves. I have yet to meet someone who is a member of the approving 18%. No company would consider a management team as incompetent as the ones we have picked to run our country. I maintain that the root cause of the current pathetic level of performance is closely related to the undeserved power we have given our two political parties.

I specially blame the Democrats because they claim to be the party protecting the average American and have failed. The Republicans openly favor wealth and privilege interests and aggressively protects them with all its political power. In spite of their vast resources the Democrats, by contrast, show only weakness as they fail to confront the Republicans and the bean counters destructive and one sided policies. These policies have been very destructive to middle America. There is no third party to pick up the fallen flag of the American citizen.

Although our Founding Fathers did strongly warn us of the harm they could do, political parties are not mentioned in the Constitution. The current two parties have had over 150 years to legislate themselves into a very powerful position. We have let them capture both our electoral and legislative processes. They have established laws and procedures that make them very difficult to replace. We have only the election process established by the Constitution as a tool. We must very carefully use it in the 2012 election.

Our theoretical limit for Congress is to replace the entire House of Representatives and one third of the senate each national election. We must be careful, however, that the replacements are an improvement over the incumbents. This will require having real research about the candidates.

To get my vote the candidate will have to survive the following evaluation:

Be fully aware of the disaster to the American dream caused by the special interests driven government elite -- and be dedicated to correcting it


Have absolute loyalty to the United States and its people, not to a political party

Not be a one solution-solves-all ideologue.

Advocate revising congressional rules and privileges to be closely aligned with those of the average citizen.

Move the US toward a productive and creative economy by preparing and implementing a comprehensive national plan to restore our economy at all fronts.

Insist that we aggressively use all means available and eliminate the negative trade balance.

Runs a campaign that is faithful to truth and reason. Rejects the usual dodge and lie techniques.

Will treat being elected to congress as an honor and responsibility, not a position to be exploited

There are a few in congress that could pass these requirements, We must support them and drastically increase their numbers in 2012. Then we may have enough for real reform.