-Lifelong politicians who “forget” to pay their taxes.

-Corporate CEO’s with their hands in the taxpayer vault gifting themselves with billions of dollars of bonuses and perks.

-Professional lobbyists paying off politicians in exchange for legal cover to commit fraud on the public.

These are but a few examples of how America is looted daily by those we expect to do the right thing. Millions of people are losing jobs and homes, while lawmakers find ways to shovel more money into the abyss in the name of stimulating the economy. Millions of children watch their future earning power disintegrate before their eyes, while America’s corporate stooges plan their next taxpayer-funded junket. It’s enough to make a person want to scream.

Money may be the root of all evil (or the love of money, as the saying goes), but I think our current worries go beyond biblical phraseology. What we are experiencing now is nothing less than a complete breakdown of social conscience and stewardship on the part of those who should not only know better, but are expected to do better. There no longer is shame associated with screwing old ladies out of their retirement funds. There is no moral judgment against those who enrich themselves with one hand in the public till while stabbing the public in the back with the other hand. Hell, for most of these unscrupulous bastards, there isn’t even a legal reckoning to fear. In the “effort” to right the ship of state, any consideration to public scrutiny of what went wrong and why it got that way is deemed not relevant to the “real” problem.

Forgive me if I beg to differ.

The economic crisis may well be the important issue at hand, but trying to solve it with the same people who created it doesn’t really seem to be the best idea to me. We may now have an administration bent on changing the way politics works in this country, but Team Obama has certainly stumbled on its way out of the chute. When “change” is the mantra of the day you not only have to say it, you have to mean it, live it, breathe it in every action along the way. To his credit, Obama has accepted responsibility for some bad selections of staff. But he’s also violated his own new lobbying rules by granting waivers to several who wouldn’t get jobs under the new rules. Bending the rules when they don’t suit you is the old way of doing politics. I think we expected a bit more.

The looting of America isn’t just the emptying of the treasury into the hands of private bankers, auto makers, and insurance corporations. The looting of America also reflects a vacuous morality that says, “Screw you-I’m only out for me.” We’re not only losing our hard-earned money, we’re losing the sense of common commitment that creates and sustains a nation.

If anything, the economic crash is just the last symptom in a body riddled with disease. We ignored the other symptoms for so long that eventually we began to think of them not as signs of poor national health at all, but instead as an evolution towards a better, stronger entity. Corruption that permeated all aspects of public life-from the boardrooms to the backrooms of Congress-was sold as virtuosity if it increased the profit margin. If you had to lie, steal, or bend the letter of the law farther than a world record holding limbo artist, so be it. After all, so long as the general public was wrapped up in petty debates of pretend morality (flag burning, gay marriage, nudity on TV and assisted suicide) the bigwigs could operate behind the scenes pretty much unfettered. At least until the house of cards finally collapsed.

The looting of America is almost complete. Our public finances are a disaster, and our personal finances aren’t in great shape either. Our national infrastructure has deteriorated while those entrusted to its care have fleeced the treasury. But worse is the fact that we accept these things as commonplace to such a degree that outrage is not only invisible, it’s often unthinkable. And when it does rear its head, there’s some “patriotic” idiot ready to slap it down in the name of “good Christian, American morals.” After all, if you admit that your country is failing and that your leadership is filled with greedbags, you have to take some responsibility yourself. And accountability is NOT the American way.

Barack Obama may be the right man at the right time to actually create some changes in this country. Sadly, for many, those changes will be too little or too late. Perhaps far greater than trying to repair a broken economic system is the task of repairing the broken sense of stewardship and morality that ultimately put us in this precarious position. In the end, no amount of political tinkering will withstand the onslaught of immoral actions by those at the helm. We need to not only clean house, but fire the cleaning crew as soon as they wipe up. But that’s not going to happen. Those who hold power have made sure that it won’t happen. And most Americans are too busy complaining about the “other” guy to recognize that it’s “their” guy who is part of the problem too. 

As I said, accountability is NOT the American way. Maybe collapse is. Maybe the only way to really root out the immoral leadership is to start from scratch. At this rate, we may get that chance sooner than later. The question is whether or not we’d even notice the opportunity.

(cross posted at Bring It On!)

Melanie Sloan, executive director of CREW said today, “The officials named in this report have chosen to enrich themselves and their families and friends by abusing the power of their office, rather than work for the public good. Their collective corruption affects all Americans.”

Seems that the old saying about power corrupting still rings true. And while those of our friends on the right can easily (and with a fair amount of veracity) claim that Democrats were just as corrupt when they held the reins of power in Congress, it is also only fair to note that in their great unethical efficiency, it has only taken the Republican party a decade to achieve the same level of corruption that it took the Democrats 40 years to master. So go ahead and give your party a big pat on the back, conservatives. You really ARE #1, at least when it comes to electing professional scumbags.

Surprisingly though, (or maybe not surprisingly at all in this era where most people bitch and moan but make no effort to create change) with a recent Harris Poll showing a 73% negative view of Congress, few incumbents have lost their bids for re-election in their state primaries. I guess all those people who think Congress needs a good house cleaning want people in other districts to do all the cleaning for them. It’s kind of like the old adage used by racists. They’re all corrupt, except for my congressperson.

And what ever happened to that ethics reform that so dominated the news for a few weeks early in the year? Oh, right. No more free meals for elected officials. Otherwise, pretty much business as usual.

So, did your elected representative make this years list? Only one way to find out…read the report.

(originally posted at Bring It On!)

If you believe the polls and the opinion editorials and the general grumbling of the people on the street, you might infer that Americans are growing increasingly unhappy with the quality of service they are receiving from their government, a government that is supposedly elected to respond to their concerns as a whole, and not just a government that works for the interests of the select or noisiest few. We complain about leniency for violent criminals and revolving prison doors. We decry the complexity and snail’s pace of the legal system, both criminal and civil. We constantly tirade at the state of our educational system, our medical system, or our retirement system. We shake our heads in disgust at the corruption uncovered almost daily among the political leadership in our cities and states and national levels of government. But when the jury summons arrives in the mailbox, our first thought is finding a way to get excused. When our children fail to pass skills tests or need remedial classes to get into community colleges, we find a teacher or program to blame instead of stepping in to help our kids learn. And when our politicians are out of touch or just plain stupid, we re-elect them based on a party affiliation instead of looking for a viable alternative. Even when they are indicted for corruption, we look to their contemporaries to fill their shoes, letting the shady deals pick up as if nothing had ever changed. In increasing numbers, we aren’t even voting at all. Quid pro quo. You get what you give. If we’re as unhappy as we proclaim to be, if we’re as dissatisfied and disgusted as we profess to be, why aren’t we giving more so that we can get a better product?

Part of the problem is the growing feeling among average people that the whole political process is too corrupt to change and that nothing we could do or say will make a difference. This feeling of hopelessness is neither accurate nor acceptable if we are to revive true self-government and restore democratic values to our political system. The fact is that at least 40% and upwards of 80% of eligible voters do not participate in local, state, or federal elections. In Fixing The Vote, Parts One and Two, I explored the reasons for this dilemma and offered some viable solutions to help turn this trend around. But an even bigger part of the solution lies in changing our own attitudes and deciding to get back in the game. Hopelessness is not accurate because if all of those unheard voices would let themselves be heard, then hope could transcend into reality through the election of real people-oriented representatives instead of the paid for politicians we have now. Hopelessness is not acceptable because to abandon the process is to give it to the corrupt corporations and their political hacks, in effect handing them the key to our public assets and turning our backs as they plunder the safe. If change is what you want, then you must let it be known. Find a candidate you can support and get the silent majority to actually turn out and back your choice instead of settling for the party’s anointed golden child of the season or forgoing the vote altogether.

Do you want a representative who spends his or her time cuddling up to big money donors instead of working on the public problems? Do you want to continue to pay taxes to support an over-bloated bureaucracy that fumbles the future integrity of our educational, medical, and retirement systems? Do you want a politician who would give away your public lands and funds so that they can be exploited by billion dollar corporations or shut down entirely by special interest demands? If your answer is “Hell No!” then you must give more than lip service. You must get more involved. You must vote. Otherwise, you might just as well keep your gripes to yourself.

It may seem simplistic to continually return to the importance of voting and its ability to create reform, but as with many things in life, simple is the way to go. And truth be told, while the act of voting is among the most important tools we have for reform, it is also the least imposing form of action imaginable. It takes mere minutes (especially if you get an absentee ballot sent to you) in many cases, and in places where the lines to the polls are longer, demand for and volunteer to staff more polling centers. As registration increases with a renewed realization of the empowerment that voting can bring, election officials will be forced to open more polling centers. If they follow the model set by Starbucks (a shop on every corner, because waiting more than a few minutes is too long to wait), voting could be as easy as drive-thru service. If you want people you can trust in office, you’ve got to put them there. Quid pro quo.

Increasing the vote is the first big step, and also the easiest, at least it should be. Beyond that, levels of involvement become more time consuming, but also more important as they relate to oversight and holding elected officials accountable for their actions on our behalf. We must be willing to join local citizen panels and school associations and public information committees. We must be willing to support honest attempts at reform as vociferously as we now bemoan the idiocy that passes for judicious public stewardship. We must eliminate government excess and corruption to retain our freedoms while reforming government efficiency to sustain our future. We must stop being silent.

With the active participants of democracy already in the fray, and getting nowhere but deeper in the morass of corruption and stagnancy, the ability of this country to move to a viable Common Sense position has been reduced. It has been stealthily subverted by the corporate interests and destructive forces of distorted religious ideologies and selfish attitudes of elected officials and fringe, self-serving positions of far right and far left special interest groups. You get what you give, and when you give less and less, someone else will try to fill that gap. In American politics, average citizens have been letting someone else dictate what they should think or support because they won’t speak for themselves. Are you one of those people? If you are, the future of change really rests in your hands.

Democracy is a system of government where the majority decides the rules for the whole, where the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few. The beauty of it is, though, that the whole has a say in what those needs are, or at least, they are supposed to. And while the majority may end up with more of their interpretations becoming the law of the land, elected officials have an extra burden of duty to make sure that the rules they make on our behalf are as fair and just as possible. They are supposed to remember that they are making rules that affect everyone, themselves included. Unfortunately, our democracy is becoming a parody of itself, a sad caricature of what “people power” really is. For not only do we have widespread abdication by the people of their responsibility, we have turned the elected representative system into little more than a pre-selected popularity contest, run by the corporate and special interest groups with the money to play this absurdly expensive game. The two devolving facets of our democracy feed upon each other, each becoming more twisted away from the original intent of democratic government. When government moves away from the will of the people towards the will of the few, as ours increasingly does, it is no longer a democracy in the accepted form of the word. It is instead an oligarchy, or one that is ruled by the few, and depending on the integrity of those few, just a hop and a skip away from being an autocracy. Oligarchies and autocracies operate on the assumption that all men are not created equal, and that those in charge possess superior qualities to those that are not in charge. It is the antipathy of “people power,” but it is becoming a more and more accurate picture of our government today. We the people deserve a measure of responsibility for the state of our political affairs, but in a bigger way, those who become elected officials own the lion’s share of the shame, for they are the ones who make the rules and they are the ones who break the rules. Politicians of all stripes have turned our noble experiment in self-government into a façade, abusing the trust placed in them to line their own pockets at the expense of society as a whole.

Stewardship is the concept of managing another person’s property, finances, or affairs, and the role of a politician is to act as a good steward on behalf of the general public. Honest stewardship implies that the interests of others are put ahead of your own, simply because the things you are supposed to be looking over do not belong to you. This concept of stewardship seems to be completely gone in the halls of power today. Instead, special interests, the political parties, and corporate conglomerates have staged a coup that has usurped the rightful property (either physically or intellectually) of the people of this country as a whole. When politicians pass laws that exempt corporations from environmental responsibility, they are abandoning their role as stewards of the public lands, lands that will exist long after we are dead and that will be needed by future generations for their own sustainability. When politicians make rules that funnel public tax dollars into the offshore corporate accounts of multi-national corporations instead of into the infrastructure and well being of those who pay the taxes, they are abandoning their role as stewards of the public finances. And when politicians choose to frame their political debates in ways that deceive or mislead the public, they are forgetting their role as stewards of the public trust. As citizens, we deserve better than this. We deserve a political class that goes beyond the rhetoric of divisiveness. We deserve honest stewardship from our public officials. And it is up to us, the common people, to make sure that we get it.

So what can we do to change the way things are being run right now? The first step involves massive reforms in our voting and political funding mechanisms, as outlined in the previous two essays. Only by removing the lure of easy money and increasing the participation of everyday citizens can we begin to move towards redefining what a politician should be. But once we achieve those reforms, there are still many steps to take to return American politics to the American people.

The first, most obvious step to take should be in combating political corruption with more stringent penalties for those politicians who violate the laws related to political funding and gift taking. Whether or not we can ultimately reform those laws is practically irrelevant to making this reform a top priority. As things stand today, politicians and their financial donors already know the loopholes around the financing laws and they seem to have few, if any, qualms about circumventing both the spirit and the letter of the laws. The only way to eradicate this insidious behavior is to increase the penalties for such actions. Any politician found guilty of accepting unlawful donations, gifts, or payments of any kind should be immediately removed from office and barred from ever running for elective office again. Furthermore, such individuals should be sentenced to prison for a term equal to the amount of time they have been “on the take.” In addition to punishing the politicians, those who grease their palms should also be punished by having their personal assets frozen and their businesses taken away from them and placed into a public receivership. Only the enactment of such harsh penalties will make politicians and their patrons think twice before trying to corrupt the system for their own benefit and gain.

Secondly, we must reform the way business is done in our local, state, and federal legislative bodies. Two ways to dramatically change the status quo would be the “Read The Bills Act” (promoted by Downsize DC) as well as a ban on multi-faceted legislation. Taken together, these reforms would eliminate the ability of politicians to fill quality legislation with give-away spending measures or special interest legal maneuvers as well as requiring every politician to have a thorough knowledge of what they are voting on. As things stand today, most legislation gets saddled with any number of special interest add-on amendments, thrown in by elected officials in return for their support on the measure. Such add-ons rarely serve the public interest and instead are meant to reward the political donors. In addition, because so few legislators actually take the time to read and understand the full provisions of the things they vote on, many of these add-ons get passed as law without any real accountability in place. If legislation is so necessary as to be added to a particular bill, why must it be added in the dark of night, at the end of the packet, at the last possible minute? The obvious answer is that this kind of tit-for-tat legislating is endemic in the corrupt attitudes of our political leaders and we must put an end to it.

Third, we need to remove many of the “perks” associated with being an elected official. Compensation, in the form of salary, health care, and retirement pay, not to mention all the blank checks given for “administrative functions” should be seriously curtailed to reflect that which the average citizen could expect to receive from a similar type of job. If the Congress had to depend on the same kind of health and retirement system that the rest of us have to live with, you can be sure that they would be quick to make some real reforms in those areas too. Forget about the cries of those who say that good politicians need to be coaxed into office with these kinds of perks. Public office is about public service, not about personal wealth or special benefits. It is not a place to get rich, fat, and cared for on the public dime. We hear so much about welfare reform and the evils of being on the public dole from the very same people who themselves exist on the public funds and are always eager to soak up more.

Finally, we must refuse to accept distorted versions of the true acts of government. There is too much secrecy in our legislative bodies, often done in the name of the public good. It would seem, however, that anything that needs to be kept hidden behind closed doors probably isn’t something that is being done in the public’s best interests. Don’t confuse this call for real open government as a desire to have delicate military secrets shared with our enemies. There are some acts that do need to be kept under wraps, at least until they are borne out through action. But public policy, the deliberations of elected officials regarding public funds or social programs, and restrictions of liberty should not be kept under lock and key. Such subterfuge only reinforces the impression of corruption, and in all probability, it is corruption that keeps the doors closed.

For political change to occur, we need to change the way average people interact with the system. But to get people enthusiastic about their political leaders, we first need to have leaders we can respect, leaders we can trust, and leaders who truly want to serve the public.

The problem isn’t really with all business, per se, but rather with the evolution that has transformed business from the small or medium sized company into the multi-national behemoth that dominates the business landscape today. The legal rules that separated business endeavors from their founders and created the corporation as a separate legal entity, akin to an individual person, have bestowed upon these large companies many of the rights that are constitutionally guaranteed to us as individuals, even though the businesses are not human beings in any way. But because corporate capitalism uses its own considerable wealth to advance legislation, often times these businesses are not held accountable as an individual would be. They are receiving all of the benefits without bearing any of the responsibility. Furthermore, through their legislative access (allowed them by means of political contributions by a variety of means, both legal and extra-legal) they enjoy access to policymakers and exert influence on policy and laws without having any accountability to the general public, a practice that not-so-subtly bypasses the representative system guaranteed by our Constitution. This is wrong, and to stop this corporate subversion, we need to change our political finance laws as well as our interpretation of the rights of businesses. To what extent should a corporation’s activities be separated from those who actively manage it?

Does a business exist merely to produce profit or is it more of a cooperative effort between the business leaders and the employees to ensure mutual success? The answer should be, “Yes.” Obviously, in order for a business to be successful, it has to be prosperous at some level. It must earn enough money to pay for all of its materials and employees and utilities. And if the goal of free enterprise is to provide a materially wealthier lifestyle for the entrepreneur, a business must also generate an adequate profit for the owner. But since the success of a business is directly related to the effectiveness and expertise of its employees, business leaders need to find a balance between acceptable profit and outright greed. Most employees enjoy working for a successful corporation if they see the company returning some of its profit to the workers through benefits or raises or other perks. Yet increasingly, large businesses are decreasing their investment in their workers through reduced pension plans or decreasing health insurance coverage, or worse, through down-sizing and relocation. It’s hard to blame them with costs for these programs skyrocketing in recent years, but in many cases, corporate profits are increasing at just as rapid rates, yet the employee cuts continue unabated as the shareholders profits rise. Reducing the costs of doing business should be a top priority in the area of economic reform, and I’ve already discussed ways to significantly decrease or eliminate the costs associated with retirement and health benefits. (See The National Whole Life Pension Plan and Affordable Health Care Does Not Mean Free Health Care) But any reductions in the cost of doing business should be translated into lower costs, better products, higher wages or any combination of the three. If society and politics work to reduce the costs to business, we should expect business to reduce their desire for enormous profit margins and settle for merely large or even modest profit margins.

We also need to take a look at certain areas of business that generate large profit margins simply because the products or services rendered are necessities for living in this modern world or are mandated by law or nature. A prime candidate for scrutiny would be businesses in the energy industry. Modern society requires a fair amount of energy, either as electricity or as gasoline. And although we derive our electricity from a variety of public sources (hydroelectric plants using public river ways for energy, wind farms using public air, or nuclear generators using public minerals and dollars), the costs to the public are anything but consistent. In a capitalist system, these fluctuations are attributed to supply and demand, but recent shenanigans in this sector of business have shown us that this isn’t necessarily the case. Manipulation and false scarcity have been used to increase the costs to the consumer for no reason other than greed, and the energy sector isn’t alone in this. (For ideas on energy reform, read The Future of Energy) Insurance companies, whose products are often mandated by law, and medical companies, whose products are mandated by nature, also engage in these kinds of manipulations. Perhaps returning some of these businesses to public control, or at least more stringent public regulation is finally in order. After all, there are plenty of other ways for people to make their fortune without having to gouge consumers for the very necessities of modern life.

Corporations, because they are also the main source of employment for many, also enjoy certain legal protections not afforded to individuals. This is done under the assumption that a large business is too valuable, in terms of tax revenue and as an employer of the people, to hold accountable for many of its mistakes. We see the error of this thinking all around us, but usually only learn of it once the real damage has been done. Think in terms of environmental pollution or sealed out of court settlements. Think in terms of hushed up research documents in the rush to market the newest medicine. Think in terms of massive product recalls due to cheap or defective parts. All of these issues tend to diminish the image of business in the eyes of the public. Yet our politicians support these loopholes as if they were part and parcel to the way the world works. As individuals, we expect accountability from each other. We expect honesty and integrity. Why don’t we demand the same of corporations? Why don’t our politicians? The truth is that the corporations don’t care what we think, because they’ve paid for the politicians to keep things as they are and our apathy at the voting booth affirms their assumption that we don’t care or can’t see what is happening. Corporations need to be held accountable for the products they sell. They need to b
e held accountable for the messes they make. They need to be open and forthright when they discover a faulty product. And they need to put safety and integrity at the same level of concern as they put profit.

Finally, businesses, both large and small need to have greater accountability to the public (if they are a publicly held corporation) or to their employees and customers (if they are a small or medium business) in both their financial dealings and their human efforts. Employees should be paid a living wage, (which becomes more possible with pension and health care reforms) be offered a fair amount of leave for illnesses and vacations, and be given the opportunity to grow with the company to their ability and aspirations. It is the best interest of any business to have happy, productive employees, and this can be achieved without seriously harming profit. Simply offering more flexibility in scheduling and more reasonable expectations from overworked staffers would be a start. After all, there is only so much money a person can enjoy, and no one wants to be worked into insanity. The benefits derived from making other people’s lives happier can outshine the brightest diamond, and they provide more goodwill towards a company in the long run.

I don’t think of business as evil, or capitalism as the enemy, and I don’t think money will automatically turn you bad. But it is plain to all who care to look with an open eye that the modern constructs of business in society are leading us back to a place we’d sooner keep in the past. Unless we make an effort to drive the influence of corporate money from our politics, unless we begin to demand honesty and integrity from our business leaders, and unless we teach the future leaders of business that people matter more than profit, we will see a return to the days of indentured servitude as the costs of living continue to outpace wages because our poor, rich corporations aren’t clearing enough profit.

But what is trust? How did we lose it? And more importantly, how do we rebuild it again? Although their are different levels of trust, the basic concept of trust can be defined as having a sure reliance on the integrity, ability, or character of a person or thing to do that which they have been tasked to do. Whether one is referring to a trust between a parent and a child to adhere to a rule or provide care or implying the duty of an elected official to place the community needs above their own personal aspirations, trust relies upon individual honesty and integrity. We learn, through actual or vicarious experience, who we can trust. As children, we are brought into this world with an instinctive trusting nature. In order to survive, we must trust our mother to care for us, to nurture us. And unless this trust is breached early in life, we gain a capacity to learn to trust those around us. We also, as we age, gain the capacity to evaluate whether the recipient deserves the trust we give so freely. Those who promise things they can’t deliver soon lose our trust, whether they are our sibling, our employer, or our governmental leaders.

For most people, trust is not an absolute condition. Indeed, it is probably difficult to name more than a few people you might consider completely trustworthy. Human nature, being what it is, almost guarantees that at some point in our lives, we will damage a relationship of trust with someone, either purposely or unconsciously. A friend needs help desperately and we promise that we will lend a hand, but at the hour of need, we are called away to something else. The trust has been damaged. We may not lose the friendship, but we’ll probably not be asked for assistance again. Your friend may still trust you to pay your share of the dinner tab, but it may not go much farther than that. Efforts to rebuild that trust require us to go above expectations and work twice as hard to regain what may have previously been an unquestioned facet of a relationship.

Trust between friends or family is the first layer of trust that builds and stabilizes a society. Without this basic level of interpersonal trust it is impossible to expand the concept of trust into society at large. Societies are held together by a common goal and a trust that each person is working towards that goal with their own contributions. So as we learn to trust on a personal level, and as we acquire those traits that enable others to trust us, each individual becomes responsible for becoming a contributor to the greater society through employment or public service, by paying taxes and adhering to common laws, and by doing that which they are tasked and have agreed to do. But just as we learn to expect integrity from the people around us, we also expect integrity from the social institutions that make our society great. We expect our employers to treat us decently and pay us fairly. We expect strangers to obey the laws and we expect the courts to enforce the laws. We expect corporations to follow the law too, and to offer goods or services that deliver what they promise. We expect our schools to educate our children with the facts of science and mathematics and language. We want to trust that these entities, these non-human organisms, will adopt the trust engendering traits of the humans who operate them, and that these organizations, once in possession of our trust, will not betray it.

When it comes to government and other social leaders, gaining and maintaining trust with the community is an even more complex matter, one that today seems to have been deemed unnecessary at best, non-existent at worst. Political cynicism is at great heights, in large part because of decades of the polarizing and demonizing tactics of the political parties, but also because of the lack of integrity in elected officials, and the corruptible nature of money, power, and access traded between corporate heads and politicians. A half-decade or more of seemingly unending corporate meltdowns coupled with a political class that is increasingly out of touch with its constituents and completely ensconced in its own PC spin machines has left a bitter scar on the trust between the governed and the governors. (These same problems of trust can be applied to the geopolitical world of international politics as well, or to the fissures caused by religious differences around the world.)

And yet there are levels of trust within each of these layers of trust. We can reasonably trust that certain conditions will be met by our employers, but we can’t reasonably trust that those conditions will remain throughout our career. We can have security in our trust that the government will continue to provide a measure of public safety services, but we can’t always be sure that they will be effective or adequately funded. We may trust certain things about each other or from our leaders, but not others. To a degree, that may be a healthy trait, for blind trust requires no effort from the recipient and is easily and often abused. But trust is a two way street. In order to get trust, one must earn trust. And trust is earned with honesty and the ability to follow through on ones promises to the best of ones ability.

It’s pretty hard to trust our politicians these days. Regardless of your political ideology, members of both parties are tainted with the corruption of our electorate system, practically forcing them into the beds of special interest groups and corporate donors in order to feed the cash cow of political success. They hide their real motives behind flowery obfuscations and ineffective programs while positioning themselves or their benefactors to reap the bounty of the nation’s efforts. They espouse semantics as an effective rebuttal to wrongdoing while continuing on the present course of business as usual. Yet as citizens, we are not much better. We ignore elections in droves, apathetically assuming that nothing can change. We dissect every aspect of a candidate’s life whether it has relevance to the desired office or not. We live for the scandal. We drink up the distractions. We feed the flames.

So what is the solution? If the trust between everyday people and the leaders of our country- business, social, and political- has become stretched to the breaking point, what steps can we take to rebuild and eventually maintain the necessary levels of trust for society to flourish? Although we have become a pretty cynical society, there are still many basic levels of trust operating fairly well across the board. And although there are many Common Sense reforms that could strengthen those levels of trust, a simple reckoning between the government or business or social leaders and the general public would be a great start.

People want to trust each other, if for no other reason than that it makes life a whole lot easier. But trust requires honest information, and it is long past time that we begin to demand an unadulterated accounting from our government and our corporate heads with regards to their true intentions, plans, or goals for our society. We must be prepared to replace those sitting in the chairs of power if they refuse to act with honesty, either at the election box or with our wallets. Further, we must hold these people to their word and expect that they will follow through with what the say they will do. No longer should people in power be allowed to claim undeserved credit or ignore the will of their constituents. (A caveat here would be that elected officials would first have to ensure that their constituent’s wishes do not run contrary to the principals of individual freedom or social cohesion.) As citizens, we must shed our cloaks of apathy and return to the political arena. We must support meaningful election reform (to be discussed later) and encourage more candidates to run for office. We must quit buying in to the politics of divisiveness and instead embrace Common Sense.

Maintaining trust and even expanding it will require hard work, vigilance, and enduring cooperation among all the members of society, from the schoolhouse janitor to the President of the United States. It may well mean a complete overhaul of our political class in favor of untainted, public minded individuals without ties to the lobbyists. It may well mean radical campaign and election reform. It may well mean taking a serious look at who we are, where we want to be, and how we want to get there.

Honesty builds trust. Integrity builds trust. Success builds trust. It’s just simple Common Sense.