After watching an interview with notorious lobbyist Jack Abramoff, I came to three Realizations. The first was fairly obvious; This system is incapable of being "reformed". You could liquidate all of K street, and they'd just come back meaner. Instead of giving bribes, they'd start kidnapping, hiring investigators to get blackmail material, or just flat out kill those who don't play ball.
Which brings me to my next point. Abramoff repeatedly in the interview states that he thought he was one of the nice guys, and as we can clearly see, he didn't exactly play hardball with his clients. Yet the interviewer still felt revulsion, and I suppose rightly so. But there was the sense that the interviewer thought the government and the system wasn't really to blame. Of course, such a notion is ridiculous, as it takes two to tango; but even then, "don't hate the player, hate the game". It's the fact that there's a floor for these folks to dance on that's the real problem. Remove the arbitrary power of the government, and the reason to corrupt those involved disappear.
The last thing I noticed was remarkably more subtle. If organizations like Abramoff's can get this deep in so quickly, what about more powerful organizations? It makes one realize that maybe this consipracy talk about secret societies might just be on to something. When one realizes how many CFR, Trilateralists, Bilderbergers, and members of other secret clubs are right up there at the top regardless of which direction you look, you realize that maybe their influence isn't so different from those folks Abramoff "owned". Heck, when you think about it, the two parties are really just this sort of corrupt lobbying organization in an institutional capacity.
Considering all this, one begins to understand why despite the faces changing, none of the policies out of Washington do. Even if you elect a good man as president, he'll be surrounded by people who only present the side of the story they want seen. That must by why President Jackson instituted the spoils system. He knew he couldn't get anything done any other way.
