Skip to contentSigns of a Societal Decay
Modern societies specialize in a dazzling number of indicators that mark the ups and downs of various activities, especially economic, health and audience ratings. But when it comes to signs of societal decay that cannot easily be reduced to numbers, there is a void. So let’s look at four “decays” that are trending downward.
Gluttony literally is rapidly becoming a competitive sport. In fact,
out-gourging has become a contest with the gourgers riding circuit
around the country performing in what its euphemists call “competitive
eating.” No longer one of the seven deadly sins in this field, “Crazy
Devin” Lipsitz, winner of the 2000 year United Carnegie International
Pickle Eating Contest in New York City, describes his skill as “a
sport” played by “athletes.”
There is even an International
Federation of Competitive Eating which presides over dozens of events a
year where contestants inhale hot dogs (the champion swallowed 50 hot
dogs in 12 minutes), matzoh balls, chicken wings and who knows what’s
next — mayonnaise?
The voyeuristic audience for such gluttony
battles is growing fast. It may be only a matter of time before the
first cable TV show is launched. By the way, according to the rules, if
an “Athlete” vomits, he/she is disqualified. So much for the Peter the
Great manuever.
Next on the decay derby is Tyco under CEO L.
Dennis Kozlowski, presently the defendant in a criminal trial. He held
a $2 million 40th birthday party for his wife in faraway Sardinia that
featured a shrunken model of Michelangelo’s David with vodka streaming
from its penis into crystal glasses. Videotapes also showed an
exploding birthday cake with a replica of a woman’s breast. Government
prosecutors charge that Tyco paid for much of this party as a
deductible business entertainment expense.
Parents cannot deduct
their children’s college tuition as educational expenses. Yet
corporations can and do deduct liquor, lurid entertainment and
expensive, luxurious gifts as “ordinary and necessary” business
expenses. They thereby reduce the revenues going to the U.S. Treasury
which could have been used to provide grants and loans to America’s
deserving students. Call this the decay of inverted priorities.
A
third decay comes from the electoral arena. There was a time in our
history when a resurgent citizenry gave itself the right to vote. So
the oligarchs devised a “wealth election” when dollars began voting in
ever greater numbers. But buying elections was not enough for the power
brokers in the two major Parties. Lately they are determined to pick
their voters by increasingly precise computer-driven legislative
redistricting.
In the past redistricting came once every ten
years after the decennial census. Now Republicans and Democrats can not
resist the lure of more frequent redistricting because, depending on
who controls the state government, the reward of making their one party
districts are obvious. In Texas, the state Republicans have broken
cynical new ground in passing legislation that carves new zig-zag
Congressional districts in order to pick the voters that would replace
almost certainly up to five Congressional House Democrats with
Republicans. These elections are over before they start.
The
courts have been too lenient in permitting such blatant electoral
map-making that is turning most of House of Representative Districts
into areas of one-party domination. Both Parties now believe that over
90% of House Districts in the country are not competitive, meaning that
the other major party doesn’t try to contest the incumbents seat. This
is worsening decay for voter choice and political competition in a
weakening democracy.
The fourth “decay” is occurring in the
midst of the nation’s largest corporate crime wave (remember Enron,
Worldcom, Health South, etc., etc.) that has drained or looted
trillions of dollars from millions of workers, their pension funds and
small investors. Well, it seems that the corporate crooks so vastly
outnumber the federal cops on the corporate crime beat that
“accommodations” have become necessary.
Faced with a tiny
enforcement budget and the”soft on corporate crime” attitude of the
Bush Administration, the Justice Department has developed ways to avoid
traditional, straight out indictment, prosecution and conviction
approaches of the past.
Presently, the Department initiates a
criminal prosecution of a company and then settles for a probation plus
a modest fine. Or, the Department criminally prosecutes companies but
then enters into a “deferred prosecution” agreement stipulating that
the case will be dropped if the company shows good behavior over a year
or two. Another lax approach is to file criminal charges but then not
prosecute the company and instead enter into a “memorandum of
understanding.”
Large corporations with their giant corporate
law firms skilled in battles of attrition and delay can routinely bring
the small number of state and federal prosecutors to such levels of
concessions, if they do not escape prosecution filings entirely in the
first place.
Congressional and state legislators know this, as
they raise money from these companies for their campaign treasuries. So
these lawmakers return the favor to their business benefactors by
starving the budgets of these federal and state anti-corporate crime
task forces. And you the consumers, workers and investors of America
continue to pay the Big price.