shining city on a hill

Babylon is the seat of all corruption. It's had several names and locations over the centuries; Bertolt Brecht, for example, called it "Mahagonny" and placed it in the middle of Alabama. For Martin Luther, the hierarchy of priests who ran sixteenth-century Rome and had perverted Christianity, turning it into a predatory, for-profit enterprise, had also transformed "the eternal city" into the source of all evil.

In our own time, corruption's main thoroughfare, Wall Street, runs 230 miles from New York City to Washington, DC, and the Whore of Babylon rides the beast, whose seven heads have names like Goldman-Sachs and Citigroup, back and forth along its well-traveled asphalt. Like all whores, she's adept at pretending to be different people at different times, but no matter whether she's assuming the "liberal" persona she favors today or the "conservative" personality of her recent past, her only concern is to be fed by the beast, and to feed him a hundredfold in return.

The dominion of the Whore is no longer in any doubt when one of the key players at the very pinnacle of power candidly says of the U.S. Senate that "the banks own the place," as Salon.com columnist Glenn Greenwald recalls today. Greenwald analyzes the details of this openly confessed corrupt regime, linking to and leaning heavily on the most recent episode of Bill Moyers' Journal, which featured interviews with author Simon Johnson and an outspoken Democratic congresswoman from Ohio, Marcy Kaptur.

Even more revealing of our national identity is this post from the blog "Politics in the Zeros," which reproduces the Populist Party platform from 1892. As the poster of this item notes, with a few changes in its language it would be perfectly applicable to the social conditions we're facing today. (Found this item via Crookssandliars.com.)

I keep watching my fellow citizens place their hopes for change and for a viable future for themselves and their families on the Democrats, as if something good might come out of that festering pustule of political degeneracy. It's true that there are some Democrats who still have some integrity, like Representative Kaptur, for example. But the party itself is hopeless, and a people thirsting for reform will eventually realize that the Democrats are a very frail support to lean on.

We need to find some real representatives, people willing to do whatever it takes to lay this detestable whore six feet under, and send the beast she's riding back to hell where it belongs.