Our political system, like just about every political system in the world, is corrupt because if one needs to get elected, compromises in terms of ethics will always be made as it's all about the money. With the US system, the lack of term limits bites because if you had term limits, the amount of corruption would be limited to the term. Without term limits, we have guys like Schumer and McConnell forever, along with Joe Manchin, a poster child showing just how persuasive corruption truly is.
The first time I went to the State Capitol, I was on a fifth-grade field trip. “You were so excited to learn about how a bill becomes a law,” my mother recalled. “But the tour guide spent nearly the entire time talking about the gold-plated dome and chandeliers.”
Even to a child, the contrast between the lavishness of the government and the trailers that some of my classmates lived in was obvious and uncomfortable. In 2018, this incongruity became a political crisis when the Legislature took the extraordinary step of impeaching the entire State Supreme Court over their office renovations. By all measures, the renovations were grotesque: A blue suede sofa priced at $32,000 does not belong in any public office, especially not in a state where, according to the Census Bureau, the per capita income was about $29,000.
Last December, the reporter Amelia Knisely was dismissed from a partly state-run radio station after reporting on alleged abuses at government facilities. That same year, the State Senate banned photography during the debate over abortion. A year before that, in 2021, the Legislature outlawed a major source of union funding — retaliation, the West Virginia University law professor Bob Bastress believes, for a 2018 teachers’ strike. When Mr. Bastress filed a pro bono suit on behalf of the unions, W.V.U. informed him that going forward, professors would need permission to represent interests that may be “adverse to the state.” But whose state? Adverse to whom?
If utility companies want to switch from coal — which as of 2021 supplied 91 percent of the state’s electricity — to cheaper energy sources, they must now seek permission from the Public Energy Authority, a long inactive agency that Gov. Jim Justice resuscitated at the West Virginia Coal Association’s annual conference. As that rule was signed into law, last March, the governor, who owns mines throughout the southeastern part of the country, held a lump of coal aloft. “I owe my life to this right here,” he said.
It doesn't have to be this way does it. George Carlin was right, Critical thinking is key to democracy, a notion Tom Payne knew without question. Read Cassidy Rosenblum's piece in it's entirety. You learn a lot, I know I did.
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