We live in a democracy universally acknowledged to be the greatest governing system in the world. But a democracy is only as strong as it is responsive to all of its citizens. While our current government crows about the endless rain of profit on Wall Street, average Americans are sitting back and wondering, What about me? What about my children? What about their lousy school? What about my retirement, our health care?

And we have no faith in our elected leaders to do anything about it. The economic boom of the '90s has masked a looming national crisis: a corrupt political system that auctions off public policy to the highest bidder, and leaves the overwhelming majority of Americans feeling alienated from their own government.

American politics is broken-under the thumb of a small corporate elite using its financial clout to control both parties' political agendas. The founding democratic principle of "one man, one vote" has been replaced by the new math of special interests: thousands of lobbyists plus multimillions of dollars equal access and influence out of the reach of ordinary citizens.

From 1997 to 1999, according to the Center for Responsive Politics, the number of registered lobbyists in Washington grew by 37 percent, to more than 20,000, while the amount of money they spent reached $1.42 billion. Crunch the numbers: That's roughly 38 lobbyists for each member of Congress. Like a swarm of ravenous termites reducing a house to sawdust, they are making a meal out of the foundations of our democracy.

And what are we ordinary Americans doing about it? Not much-at least not yet.

Almost two out of three Americans didn't even bother to vote in the last election-115 million eligible voters failed to exercise a right for which a few months later people were willing to die in East Timor, where the turnout was 98.6 percent.

Back at home, among the 36 percent who did vote, many held their noses while voting for the candidate they abhorred the least. According to the Committee for the Study of the American Electorate, since the 1960s national voter participation has fallen more than 25 percent, the largest and longest slide in our country's history. Twenty-five million Americans who used to vote now choose not to.

And if a democracy is only as healthy as its voters, then its life expectancy depends on the involvement of its youngest voters. So it's especially troubling that young people, together with poor people, have the lowest turnout and the steepest decline in participation. Only 20 percent of Americans aged eighteen to twenty-four voted in the 1998 elections. Despite the Rock the Vote campaign, and MTV's growing political forays, as of 1996 fewer than half of America's eighteen- to twenty-four-year-olds had even registered to vote.

Even the idealists are getting discouraged-they're pushing a product no one likes. "How do you sell political participation," Rock the Vote director Seth Matlins asked, "when the state of politics is just so repulsive?" The group's founder, Jeff Ayeroff, concurs: "If 1992 was about enlightenment, then we're in the dark ages now."

When turnout among the young shrinks from 50 percent in 1972 to 32 percent in 1996, it's foolish to keep pretending our democratic future is safe. With that rate of decline, in forty years nobody will be voting.

It's a stinging repudiation of the rotten spectacle our elections have become that despite a Motor VoterÐfueled surge in voter registration-a net increase of 5.5 million from 1994 to 1998-voter turnout declined by 2.5 million. Registration drives have only increased the number of eligible people choosing not to vote.

The American people aren't satisfied by this-and they aren't stupid. Since 1964, the University of Michigan's National Election Studies has regularly asked eligible voters a simple question: whether, in their opinion, the U.S. government is run "for the benefit of all" or "by a few big interests." In 1998, nearly two-thirds-64 percent-answered "a few big interests," a complete reversal of the electorate's opinion in 1964. Sixty-two percent-compared to 36 percent in 1964-agreed with the statement, "Public officials don't care much what people like me think."

The Michigan study also found that attitudes toward government are clearly divided along lines of class and education. The least-educated respondents agreed much more often (58 percent) than the most-educated (24 percent) that people have no say in their government. The same was true in terms of income. About half of all lower-income Americans feels disenfranchised from the political process, compared with only 18 percent of those whose income is in the top 5 percent. And unskilled workers are nearly twice as likely to feel this way as professionals-64 percent to 33 percent.

Shouldn't the opposite be the case? Shouldn't those with the most have the least to expect from our collective efforts, and those with the least have the most to expect? Isn't that what's meant by comforting the afflicted? If the least educated and the poorest among us-those at society's margins-have the lowest expectations of government accountability and responsiveness, what does that say about our society?

Millions of voters are feeling ignored by politicians more concerned with staying in power than with serving the people. And when a candidate wins, it becomes increasingly unlikely that he or she will ever lose. In 1998, House incumbents ended up running unopposed in 95 districts, while in 127 they faced only token opposition. It's no surprise then that a record 98.5 percent of them were reelected, collecting an average of more than 70 percent of the vote. In an ideal world, a people that reelects almost 99 percent of its leaders would seem to be happy with them. But in the real world, you only have to win once to become a permanent fixture in a rotting political establishment.

Of course, our politicians pay plenty of lip service to reform. But in reality, under our current system, actual efforts to overhaul government last about as long as Bill Clinton's and Newt Gingrich's famous handshake in New Hampshire, when they assured the nation that they were ready to enact reform.

Our political world is divided into two camps: those who consider plummeting turnout and high disengagement a serious threat to our democracy, and those who do not. The problem is that almost every elected official and political consultant is in the latter camp. Which isn't so surprising when you consider how many of them owe their jobs to the worst aspects of the system.

More interesting is what's happening in the first camp, where an ad hoc alliance is bringing together such unlikely bedfellows as Democratic power broker Robert Strauss, perennial activist Ralph Nader, Republican presidential candidate John McCain, and conservative Congressman Peter Hoekstra. Strauss has warned his party-mates about the "brutal truth" of an "unprecedented disengagement from politics by the American people," while Nader notes that "citizens are staying away from the polls in droves because of their disgust, distrust, despair and disillusionment with tweedle-dum, tweedle-dee politics." Hoekstra is even bleaker: "Voter satisfaction and participation are at or near all-time lows. Why should a person vote? And what for? Candidates who prefer smear over substance, money over principle and length of service over tangible action?"

The defenders of the status quo have no problem with disaffected citizens dropping out-it keeps them from making waves. Better that they get out than care enough to stay in and vote against them. In many ways, it is easier to play to, control, and manipulate a smaller audience. The key is to keep giving them no alternatives until they give up. "In general, the public is satisfied," former Rep. Vic Fazio (D-Calif.) has said, "or as satisfied as they will ever be." No candidate who demonstrates such blithe complacency should be allowed to retire comfortably after twenty years in office, as Fazio did in 1998. He should be kicked to the curb at the next election.

So should any candidate who waxes lyrical about our "unprecedented prosperity" without acknowledging that millions are being left out of it. "Xers may well be the first generation whose lifetime earnings will be less than their parents'," writes Ted Halstead, president of the New America Foundation. "Already they have the weakest middle class of any generation born in this century." Adjusted for inflation, the weekly earnings of men aged twenty to thirty-four have fallen by nearly one-third since 1973.

Getting a college education used to be a ticket out of financial insecurity. But no longer. The current crop of college graduates has seen its earnings from 1989 to 1995 fall by nearly 10 percent in relation to the previous generation-the first time that's ever happened.

At the same time, personal debt has skyrocketed. Americans from twenty-two to thirty-three years old have the greatest personal debt level of any age group. This includes over $2,000 per person in credit card debt, which is carried by 62 percent of Xers. They also suffer the greatest anxiety over debt, with nearly half reporting that it "concerns them a lot."

In fact, up to 60 percent of all Americans carry some credit card debt. In what they proudly term the "democratization of credit," credit card companies in 1998 extended over $2.5 trillion in debt. Americans' personal credit card debt level has increased to over half a trillion dollars in 1998. All that personal debt has turned our economy into a ticking bomb. One family in sixty-eight filed for bankruptcy in 1998-more than saw a child graduate from college. Meanwhile, Congress has proposed legislation that would make it much harder for consumers to erase their debt by declaring bankruptcy.

Not only is this era of prosperity built on a house of cards, the crisis goes much deeper than just the immediate concerns of middle class debtors. "Most things are going right for our country," the president has said-but it's a disturbing statement to anyone who's keeping an eye on the other America: nearly 700,000 layoffs in 1998, 56 percent more than the year before; the biggest one-month surge in unemployment claims in six years; and a study of four Northwest states that revealed more than half of the available jobs do not pay a living wage.

While conventional wisdom holds that America is thriving, it's hard to escape the notion that the United States has been torn in two-divided between a moneyed elite getting rich from globalization and an increasing number of citizens left choking on the dust of Wall Street's galloping bulls. Corporate America has never been more robust; in fact, since 1990-the supposed end of the Greed Decade-the pay of CEOs has gone up more than 440 percent. At a time when the wealth is supposedly spreading, income inequality is higher than ever.

In 1964, 36 million Americans lived in poverty. Thirty-five years and a War on Poverty later, 35.6 million remain below the poverty line.

In the spring of 1999, the Casey Foundation's "Kids Count" report identified 9.2 million children "growing up with a collection of disadvantages that are cause for exceptional alarm," and focused on "the persistent exclusion of far too many of our children and families from the full promise of American life." "Kids Count" directly contradicts the rosy data being spun from both ends of Pennsylvania Avenue, drawing attention to the burgeoning number of children-5.6 million-in families of the working poor. Despite the economic boom and an unemployment rate at a twenty-five-year low, the U.S. child poverty rate remains at 21 percent-the highest in the developed world.

Around the same time, the United Way of Los Angeles released its "Tale of Two Cities" report, spotlighting the growing disparities in the richest city in the nation and concluding that "economic conditions for children have not been so precarious since the Great Depression." One out of three children in Los Angeles lives below the poverty level; the number of abused children placed in foster care has risen 86 percent in the past decade; and even with the recent drop in violent crime, homicide is still the largest single cause of death for children under eighteen.

The story isn't much different around the rest of the country. According to officials of thirty major cities surveyed by the U.S. Conference of Mayors "the strong economy has had very little positive impact on hunger and homelessness." Ninety-three percent of those responding expected the demand for emergency shelter to increase further next year. Second Harvest, the biggest national network of food banks, says its clientele is growing by 10 percent a year-a rate not yet rivaling Starbucks, but demonstrating the growing divide.

A flurry of reports last summer further documented the split between the country's rich and poor:

According to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, the poorest fifth of single-mother families lost an average of $577 a year in income and benefits between 1995 and 1997. The Center also projected that the poorest fifth of Americans will be left with 9 percent less than they had in 1977 and the richest fifth with 43 percent more-a record level for the after-tax income gap between rich and poor.

A Children's Defense Fund study, meanwhile, showed that in one year-from 1996 to 1997-the number of children living in extreme poverty (that is, making less than half of poverty-level income) rose by 26 percent among single-mother families.

According to the Urban Institute, the median annual income of welfare recipients-including those with children-who left the rolls for jobs between 1995 and 1997 was $13,788. They may have escaped welfare, but they certainly haven't shaken poverty.

During a recent speech at the Congressional Faith and Politics Institute, I was asked what we could do to raise the profile of poverty in this country. "Put a Republican back in the White House," I replied-not because he would do more for the poor, but because it might inspire the champions of the Left to reunite with their estranged consciences and regain their voices.

During the 1980s, Democrats were quick to deride Ronald Reagan's claims of "Morning in America," with New York Governor Mario Cuomo famously, and rightly, chiding the Great Communicator's vision of "a shining city on a hill" by saying, "There is despair, Mr. President, in faces you never see, in the places you never visit in your shining city." But Cuomo, and many of the most vocal Democrats of the '80s, suddenly came down with laryngitis in the '90s, their cries of outrage replaced by cocktail chatter about the soaring NASDAQ. How many of the faces ignored by Reagan have Democratic leaders seen lately? If the answer is more than zero, they've kept it to themselves.

It was the original "compassionate conservative," Teddy Roosevelt, who called the presidency a "bully pulpit." Unfortunately, the president has failed to use that pulpit to rally Americans on behalf of the poor. Overnight hospital stays, car safety belts, and school uniforms have all merited bully pulpit time, but not the poor. Talk about poverty has been replaced by the assertion that, as Clinton put it in a 1999 radio address, "Finally the rising tide of our economy is lifting all boats."

Like one of those single-issue cable networks, the White House has given us the twenty-four-hour Boom Channel-All Prosperity, All The Time (with, of course, lots and lots of commercial sponsors). Prosperity is the theme of Campaign 2000; the candidates are dishing it out like burgers and watermelon at a straw-poll picnic. Listening to them talk, it's as if they're auditioning not for leader of the free world, but for Regis Philbin's gig on Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?

In announcing his candidacy last September (candidates are now allotted, apparently by federal law, roughly half a dozen "announcements," which the media obligingly cover), Bill Bradley repeatedly used the P-word. First he said he was running "to guard the economic fundamentals of our prosperity," presumably the way he used to cover players in the NBA. He then called for "a deeper prosperity . . . a prosperity that makes us feel rich inside as well as out."

What that means is anybody's guess, but even as platitude it's notable. Do you remember the days when campaign rhetoric at least tended to reach for the noble, the inspirational? But "making us feel rich inside and out"? That's more Tony Robbins than Bobby Kennedy.

Al Gore wants us to know that he, too, can pander to our love of money. "I want to keep our prosperity going," Gore said in New Hampshire, "and I know how to do it." He even vowed to make America the "world capital of prosperity." Where does he suppose the capital is now? Russia? North Korea?

Not wanting to seem soft on prosperity, George W. Bush has gone on a prosperity jag himself, determined not to cede one inch of the humming economy to his Democratic rivals. "Some in this current administration think they've invented prosperity," he said. "But they didn't invent prosperity any more than they invented the Internet." In his announcement speech (his third, I believe), Bush used the words "prosperous" or "prosperity" fifteen times. To hear him tell it, prosperity is a panacea. "We must be prosperous to keep the peace," he said, suggesting that economic wealth can even protect us from "terror and missiles and madmen." That's some bull market! Maybe by the time the year is out, the market will be healing the sick and infirm. Or turning water into stock options.

Of course, Steve Forbes is the poster child for prosperity-it's his birthright. Yet Forbes has been railing against Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan and "the high priests of finance at the Fed"; apparently, the current prosperity just isn't prosperous enough for Forbes & Co.

While they play drum major in this prosperity parade, our leaders are ignoring some fundamental truths. "History," Greenspan warned last October, "tells us that sharp reversals in confidence occur abruptly, most often with little advance notice. . . . A bursting bubble [is] an event incontrovertibly evident only in retrospect." In other words, when the downturn hits, watch out-it could be fast, furious, and completely unanticipated.

Playing grasshopper to Greenspan's ant, the White House has downplayed any uncertainty, with Treasury Secretary Lawrence Summers giving officials explicit orders on what they should and shouldn't say to help prop up confidence. Apparently, if Greenspan doesn't have something nice to say about the economy, we don't want to hear anything at all. This financial fable has been so convincing that Americans spent more than they earned in the first half of 1999-often using paper profits from the stock market to fuel this binge. And there is anecdotal evidence that a growing number of people are even using money borrowed on their credit cards to invest in the market-risking money they don't have on the expectation that the market will continue to surge.

It's another example of the "irrational exuberance"-in Greenspan's memorable phrase-that is leading millions of Americans to deny basic financial realities.

So one key assumption of the prosperity parade is that it will last forever. Another is that keeping the good times roaring will lead to everyone enjoying them-without any special effort or shared sacrifice. The language of the marketplace has eclipsed any appeal to higher values. Don't worry, the market-boosters assure us-there's no need to waste time thinking of community and civic responsibility or anything beyond your own direct economic self-interest-and somehow, a nation we can be proud of will materialize.

Indeed, in the summer of 1999, when the president undertook his ninety-six-hour poverty tour-a sort of Poor-A-Palooza-it was conducted not as an appeal to the nation's conscience but as just another profit-making opportunity. "This is not about charity," said Housing and Urban Development Secretary Andrew Cuomo, not wanting to scare anybody, "it's about investment. There's money to be made." And the president's main concern seemed to be not to alarm Wall Street. "Is there a noninflationary way to add more workers?" he asked meekly. "Is there a noninflationary way to raise wages?"

It's instructive to remember that leadership hasn't always been reduced to keeping inflation low for Wall Street titans, that it didn't always answer only to the laws of supply and demand. Thirty-two years ago, when Robert Kennedy launched his poverty tour, he shocked the nation's conscience, holding hungry children in his arms and giving the world a set of televised images that were impossible to forget. Kennedy had faith that if the American people knew more about the poverty in their own backyard, they would respond with something greater than self-interest.

"When Robert Kennedy was assassinated, something died in America," civil rights leader Rep. John Lewis (D-Ga.) has said. "Something died in all of us." Whatever it was, Clinton buried it with his flaccid rhetoric, a pale mockery of Kennedy's stirring words. It was like watching a Vegas lounge show where ersatz legends offer up feeble renditions of your all-time favorites. They've got the look, they mimic the moves-what's missing is the soul.

Maybe the most insidious byproduct of politicians' indifference to the plight of the poor has been a drop-off in attention from the media. During the Reagan years, the plight of the homeless was never too far away from the headlines, with the president roundly criticized for his "trickle-down" economy. But during the Clinton years, as those same trends have continued, the media, now themselves major players in the bull market game, have been largely silent, giving the president a free pass for his "don't look down" economy.

Media watchdogs at the Village Voice have traced a nationwide decline in the frequency, prominence, and sheer number of column inches the press has devoted to poverty in this decade: "In the fall of 1988, The New York Times devoted 50 stories to the homeless, including five front-page pieces. This year the Times has run only 10 pieces in the same period; none have begun on AÐ1." With a warm-and-fuzzy president who feels our pain and parrots back what pollsters tell him we want to hear, many Americans must have felt relieved to be able to avert their eyes-while the homeless were kicked off the front page, shuffled out of public spaces, and sealed out of our political discourse.

Call it the New Callousness: the disturbing trend in our culture toward getting the "love" out of tough love and turning an indifferent shoulder to anyone-drug addicts, the homeless, those behind bars-who hasn't had the good sense to buy shares of Martha Stewart. After all, they're getting in the way of the Panglossian message that all is well "in this best of all possible worlds."

The New Callousness is personified by media figures like Judge Judy Sheindlin, who, according to Australian Associated Press, told an audience while on a book tour Down Under that instead of attempting to control AIDS and hepatitis by providing clean needles to drug addicts, we should "give them all dirty needles and let them die."

More evidence of this cold spot on the national heart is all around us. In New York, Mayor Rudy (rhymes with Judge Judy) rang in the holiday season by ordering the NYPD to step up its efforts to sweep the city's streets of homeless people by arresting them for so-called "quality-of-life" crimes. Declaring that the city has not been strict enough in rousting people "who don't belong there," Giuliani claimed that the right to sleep on the streets "doesn't exist anywhere. The founding fathers never put that in the Constitution." He doesn't seem too keen on the homeless living in city shelters either: He recently announced that anyone wanting to stay in one would have to work or face expulsion-mental illness or not.

Apparently, he prefers sending them to jail, where mental-health-unit beds cost $91,000 annually. It costs $20,000 for a bed in a shelter and $12,000 for the supervised apartments that remain woefully underfunded, even though they have proven the most effective in dealing with chronic homelessness. "There were times," Mayor Rudy said, "in which we romanticized this to such an extent that we invited people to do it." Ah, yes, the romance of sleeping under the stars in a cardboard box in the dead of winter.

Proving that heartlessness cuts across party lines, Willie Brown, San Francisco's liberal mayor, oversaw his own crackdown on the homeless-just in time for his runoff election last fall against even-more-liberal rival Tom Ammiano. Brown clearly reveled in this rare chance to stake out the "conservative" position in the race-going so far as to arrest homeless advocates for handing out soup and sandwiches to the poor. "Advocate types claim I'm the most hostile" to the homeless, said Brown. "That's not true. I'm not the most generous. I'm not the most hostile. But I am the most firm." Call Tony Bennett, it's time for a rewrite: "I Lost My Heart in San Francisco."

In fact, more and more of our cities are using the police to enforce arcane laws-such as sanitation statutes that make it illegal to leave cardboard boxes in a public place-to get the homeless off the streets, including many homeless veterans who risked their lives for their country.

Ted Hayes, who has devoted his life to working with the homeless, calls the coast-to-coast crackdown "status cleansing." "For us to turn to outlawing our homeless citizens," he told me, "is a betrayal of the promise of America-ÔSend these, the homeless, tempest-tossed, to me.' Perhaps the Statue of Liberty should be turned around to face this country."

Transforming human beings into nuisances-problems that must be eradicated-is a dangerous step along the deadly path of dehumanization. It takes very little to end a life that has been stripped of its humanity.

In Los Angeles last May, a fifty-five-year-old mentally ill homeless woman was shot dead by an LAPD officer for brandishing a screwdriver at him while he attempted to confiscate her shopping cart. The shooting was described by Police Chief Bernard Parks as "in policy." And in Denver, seven homeless men were recently bludgeoned to death, two of the victims beheaded.

Is this the logical endgame for a culture so intent on celebrating its "winners" that it has no room left for life's losers?

That's certainly been the case in Washington, where the only major poverty policy of the Clinton years was welfare reform. The 40 percent drop in welfare caseloads since the law was passed in 1996 has conveyed the false impression that although the poor will always be with us, there are no longer enough of them to deserve our attention. But as the available jobs dry up, what will become of the 5 million welfare recipients who left the rolls? "Welfare reform has done better at moving families off the rolls than it has at moving families out of poverty," said Lawrence Aber, director of Columbia University's Center for Children in Poverty. In other words, welfare reform has been great for swelling the ranks of the working poor.

Meanwhile, the real work of helping the poor goes on largely unnoticed.

"The problem cannot be solved from afar with a media campaign, or other safe solutions operating from a distance," says Jeffrey Canada, who runs forty-three children's programs in New York. "The only way we're going to make a difference is by placing well-trained and caring adults in the middle of what can only be called free-fire zones in our poorest communities.

But instead of using his power to lead us to take up the fight, Clinton has been lulling us to sleep, waxing rhapsodic about his successes. "Now you see the signs of the transformation everywhere," he has said. "Mothers collecting their mail with a little more pride because they know they'll see a bank statement, not a welfare check; children going to school with their heads held a little higher."

The Reverend Jim Wallis, who heads the Call to Renewal, a coalition to combat poverty, paints a very different picture from the one drawn by the president and the presidential candidates. "The new icon of poverty," he told me, "is the working mother with children. I think of the woman a colleague of mine saw at a Burger King recently. She was busing tables, but kept going back to a table in the corner where two kids were sitting. She did this several times before it became apparent that she was their mother and was supervising their homework. That woman at the Burger King is supposed to be our success story."

The real battle line of the first presidential election of the new millennium will be drawn between those who answer to their corporate donors and those who speak for that single mother at the Burger King.

Of course, Americans will never give up on the idea of making things better. This sense of hope has been summoned by Doris Haddock, also known as "Granny D," an eighty-nine-year-old grandmother who recently walked from the Pacific to the Atlantic to call attention to the desperate need for political reform. "The thousands of Americans I have met are discouraged," she says, "but they are not defeated. Without exception, they deeply love the idea of America. It is a dream they are willing to sacrifice their lives for. Many of them do. There is no separating this image of democracy from their longing for personal freedom for themselves, their family, their friends. To the extent that our government is not our own, we are not free people. .. . . But the spirit of freedom is strong in the American soul, and it is the source of our optimism and joy." She's banking that one woman walking across the country can do more than hundreds of congressmen and senators running in place.

Clearly the time has come for a new politics-a politics that will challenge the status quo and contest the conventional wisdom, that will restore integrity to government, empower ordinary citizens, and make the political process once again relevant to the lives of Americans.

It's time to remake our system of government, to rid our country of the culture of greed that has infected our politicians, weakened their consciences, and tainted their policies.

It's time to throw a tent over Washington and fumigate.

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How to Overthrow the Government by Arianna Huffington
Hardcover - 224 pages (February 2000) Regan Books; ISBN: 0060393319

Copyright © 2000 Christabella, Inc.