My Name Is Vince Wade

“On some great and glorious day, the plain folks of the land will reach their heart’s desire at last, and the White House will be adorned by a downright fool and a complete narcissistic moron.”

A perceptive, smart-ass newspaper columnist named H.L. Mencken made that prediction in 1920, nearly a century ago. Unfortunately, he was right.

We have a pathological liar and narcissistic moron in the Oval Office. He admires ruthless dictators. He lies as a way of life. He is one grand jury away from criminal indictment when he leaves office. We don’t know when that may be, because he’s being investigated for possible articles of impeachment for what appears to be a gangster-like shakedown of the President of Ukraine.

Sad to say, we have a gutless Democratic Party that won’t wage an all-out struggle for what’s right. That means more than impeachment. It means finding a way to stop the right-wing packing of our federal courts—from the Supreme Court to local districts courts. It means finding a way to block the rollbacks on regulations that protect wildlife and wilderness. It means battling racial redistricting to skewer voting districts to keep white districts white. And so on and on. But the Democratic presidential candidates are too busy telling you they will fight, that’s right—fight—for your entitlements. They seem obsessed with finding and nominating the next George McGovern to run against our treasonous Criminal-in-Chief.

My name is Vince Wade. I’m a left-handed, college-educated, Medicare-card-carrying Baby Boomer. I spent most of my adult life as a TV news reporter in Detroit, specializing in crime and public corruption.

I won a batch of reporting awards, I produced some documentaries, I wrote some magazine articles. I also wrote a book called Prisoner of War: The Story of White Boy Rick and the War on Drugs.

I’m among the 57 percent who think the country is on the wrong track. It’s not just on the wrong track. Hell, it’s derailed. We live in the Dis-United States of America.

Our Democracy has vanished

We don’t live in a democracy. We live in a plutocracy that is becoming more authoritarian by the day.

What’s a plutocracy? It’s a country governed by and for the wealthy. The Congress, the courts, the White House, the news media—they all work in the service of making the rich richer. The poor are a political football and to hell with the Middle Class.

Before you write me off as a hater of the wealthy, consider this comment by Paul Volcker, the former chairman of the Federal Reserve Board:

“The central issue is we’re developing into a plutocracy. We’ve got an enormous number of enormously rich people that have convinced themselves that they’re rich because they’re smart and constructive. And they don’t like government, and they don’t like to pay taxes.”

There’s nothing wrong with being rich. But when you start using your wealth to subvert and undermine our system of government and our middle class, you’ve become a plutocrat.

In France a while back, citizens grew tired of mistreatment by the obscenely rich. This illustration of the beheading of Louis the 16th in 1793 shows what can happen when the public has had enough. It’s doubtful we can make guillotines like they used to. The plutocrats shipped our manufacturing base off shore to cut costs and increase profits.

I mentioned the U.S. is becoming authoritarian. What’s that?

It’s what China is, what North Korea is, it’s what Nazi Germany used to be. It is an oppressive, rights-crushing central government that controls peoples’ lives in countless ways and ignores established laws and norms.

It’s precisely the kind of Big Government Republicans used to say they feared from Democrats. It is usually led by a charismatic liar who tells his followers what they want to hear and does as he pleases, regardless of the legality.

The Right hates our form of government

Not so deep down, hard-core conservatives love this kind of government. For them, authoritarian government is an extension of church, or in the case of conservative Muslims, the mosque.

They crave a system that tells them what to eat, what to drink, what to wear, what they can enjoy. But most of all they want authority figures who will tell them how to think and how to live.

Meanwhile, the Democrats still haven’t figured out millions of Americans despise and hate the do-nothing Washington status quo so much that in 2016 many chose to elect a reality-TV host who has proven to be a lying criminal. It’s more than racism and contempt for women that allowed Moscow’s Secret Agent Orange to infest the Oval Office. It’s fear and loathing of the freedom to make choices.
We’re at each other’s throats in America and it just may be by design. It’s useful for some elements of the super-wealthy class. Hyper-partisan fighting distracts us from their continuing effort to shrink the middle class in order to enrich themselves.

As Pew Research reports, the actual purchasing power of middle-class paychecks has been stagnant for about 40 years.

These tyrants of net worth seem to want the country to revert to the feudal lords-and-serfs class system of the Middle Ages.

The plutocrats are aided and abetted by many in the U.S. news media. These so-called journalists suck up to the bandit aristocracy to ensure they are given interviews, what they call “access.” They work hard to rationalize the rape of the Middle Class by the Upper Class with terms like “the knowledge economy.”

Rolling Stone columnist Matt Taibbi calls the media elites, “ten-percenters working for one-percenters.”

When they aren’t sucking up to the super-rich they are good at reporting play-by-play, punch-by-punch, tit-for-tat political conflict. They work at generating conflict because shouting is good for ratings.

They usually do a poor job of explaining how the story of the day fits in to the big, long-range picture of the erosion of our middle class and our democratic form of government.

News is seldom put in historical context because too many young reporters are like their viewers and readers—ignorant of the past and unable see the big picture. Today’s press-card-carrying journalism herd epitomizes the old aphorism that those who don’t learn from history are doomed to repeat it.
No, I’m not a free-everything-for-everybody liberal. And I’m not a let-the-rich-do-whatever-they-want-and-screw-everybody-else conservative.

Politically homeless

I am what New York Times columnist David Brooks calls one of the politically homeless. I’m a centrist, but not a moderate. What the hell does that mean?

It means that I don’t drink the Kool-Aid of either political extreme. It means I think some radical, but lawful steps need to be taken to restore our system of government. Americans like me can see valid arguments from both sides on certain issues. Centrists like me think it’s OK to be liberal on some issues and conservative on others. We don’t believe you have to be ideologically rigid and able to pass so-called litmus tests by either political extreme. And we don’t think compromise is a dirty word. It used to be how our government got things done.

Capitalism needs reform

I believe capitalism, if practiced fairly, is the best economic system for the human species. But I firmly believe capitalism has been perverted and distorted to favor the so-called 1%.

The American people urgently need to realize that what is happening is deeper and more historic than the usual bickering between Democrats and Republicans—between the Left and the Right.

The only way to end this downward spiral is for average people who are not hard-core-anything to recognize this national crisis for what it is and put a stop to it. We the People must take action—lawful action—to save our country.

Decent Americans, sane people who are in the middle, need to stand up and defend the basic foundations of our system of government. There are things we can do, starting in our communities, and I intend to talk about them.

It’s a cop-out to blame everything on our wretched politicians in Washington. They are a symptom of a disease infecting our political system.

The tyranny of indifference

Edmund Burke, an Irish-British politician who lived in the 1700s said, “The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.”

Think about that. Evil prevails when good people sit on their hands and sit on their asses and do nothing. Does that describe you? Are you too busy to stand up for democracy? Too afraid of what people might say? Too afraid of the consequences of being a citizen?

If you truly are a centrist you need to ask yourself a question:

How far will I let the extremists go before I have the courage to be a citizen and stand up and do something for what is right and fair?

The middle ground and some under-reported issues are what I intend to report on and comment on in the future. I hope to be an equal opportunity pot-stirrer.