When I consider the track record of the 112th Congress, I am genuinely puzzled. Why can’t they see the big picture and work through their partisan differences to accomplish the common good? Why don’t they get that we sent them to Congress to work for us? I know the lobbyists pay them more, but when they were soliciting our votes—promises were made to us. And perhaps the biggest question of all is, what happens to the men and women we send to Congress between the time they win an election and the time they begin to get established and become part of the legislative “system”?

Out of charity, one assumes that a person seeking national office wants to fix problems that beset our nation. An office seeker generally has succeeded at some type of career, giving them credibility as to basic intelligence and ability—Christine O’Donnell’s run for a Senate seat aside. It is understandable how an outsider could see the dysfunction in Congress and assume that he or she could make a difference. And that is a laudable motivation.

But from my viewpoint, soon after making it to the House or the Senate, something goes dreadfully wrong. Instead of working to address the needs of their constituents, most officeholders soon become part of the problem. They become part of the reason why “In the latest rankings from Gallup, about 79 percent of Americans disapprove of Congress.”

Before you assume that Americans are just reflexively ungrateful, let’s consider how we reward our congressmen and women.

To begin with, most of the people we send to Congress are better off financially than the average citizen. “About one percent of all Americans are millionaires, but roughly 46 percent of those serving in Congress have a net worth of $1 million or more, according to the Center for Responsive Politics. There’s nothing wrong with being rich. But there is a problem when the people creating tax and economic policy for the whole nation are unfamiliar with the kind of financial stress faced by a typical family with a median income of less than $50,000 per year.”

Regardless of what wealth our senators and representatives bring with them, rank and file members receive salaries of $174,000 per year. But that ain’t all. There is also a choice of retirement plans, gold-plated health care, and a long list of conveniences and other perks. “A recent study by Our Generation and the Taxpayers Protection Alliance, two nonprofit research groups, found that fringe benefits for members of Congress are worth about $82,000 per year—which raises total compensation to well over $250,000. There may be a retirement crisis in many parts of America—but not on Capitol Hill.” Is it any wonder that these people are seemingly incapable of empathizing with ordinary Americans who have lost jobs, homes, and an average of 40% of their wealth during the Great Recession?

One of the facts of life in the Washington culture is the prevalence of lobbyists—22 for every member of Congress. And if they seem to know their way around, it is because many of them are former members. “This ‘shadow Congress,’ funded by corporations and various interest groups, is nearly as powerful as the real one. Whatever the case, lobbyists certainly have more sway over Congress than voters writing plaintive letters or placing earnest calls to their elected officials.” Money is the lingua franca of the culture. And if you can’t offer more than the other side is offering, your voice goes unheard.

Some of Congress’ problems are structural. In business, competition and innovation drive progress. “Congress, by contrast, still operates by ancient procedures and dallies indefinitely on business that seems urgent to most people, like addressing the weak economy or the mushrooming national debt. There’s no measure of effectiveness for Congress as a whole, and some members even insist that gridlock—a euphemism for accomplishing nothing—is in the nation’s interest. Try that one on your boss some day, and see how long you last.”

Additionally, there seems to be no penalty for ignorance. “Members of Congress sometimes reveal a dangerous degree of ignorance on vitally important issues they have considerable power to regulate. Earlier this year, the science journal Nature argued that the House Energy and Commerce Committee had ‘entered the intellectual wilderness’ by expressing ‘willful ignorance’ on climate science. Over the summer, The Economist called Republican debt-ceiling negotiators ‘economically illiterate,’ as Michele Bachmann and others dismissed the idea that a default on the nation’s debt would be economically damaging.”

Not every member of Congress is oblivious to its shortcomings. Steve LaTourette (R-Ohio) is throwing in the towel after serving since 1995. He likens Congress to a drunk “who needs to hit bottom in order to straighten out.” Explaining why he is not coming back, he cites the partisan atmosphere that makes it impossible to conduct the nation’s business. LaTourette expresses his greatest scorn for uberlobbyist Grover Norquist who wields his no-tax pledge as a means to control the vote on any tax-related legislation.

Rick Newman, chief business correspondent for U. S. News summarizes the problem—and the solution. “Sorry, people, but regular citizens bear some of the blame for the sorry state of affairs in Washington. Politicians manipulate voters every day with half-truths—or outright lies—about taxes, spending, retirement, healthcare, immigration, and many other issues that directly affect the nation’s prosperity. Too many voters embrace feel-good propaganda that they want to hear instead of learning the basic facts about issues they care about. They should do a better job of calling out dishonest politicians—and shunning media outlets that stoke political food fights. If voters want something better, they need to start by knowing what it might look like.”

So there’s enough blame to go around. As I wrote in “More Bang for Our Buck,” if good government is important to us, we’re going to have to take a hand in it.

Congress obviously can’t help itself.

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Ignorance is a choice: Money is power—Knowledge is more powerful.

What can you do—you are only one person? True, but you are only “six degrees of separation,” on average, from any other person on Earth. You become powerful when you share information with your friends and ask them to share it with their friends—it becomes a global revolution. As Stephen King suggests in The Long Walk, when these “society-supported sociopaths” come, step aside, and find the strength to run…

As improbable as it may seem, the latest attempt to address gridlock in Congress is a bipartisn effort coming out of the House itself. An encouraging sign in this time of bitter partisanship, two Republican and two Democratic representatives are co-founders of a tiny caucus named Fix Congress Now. But within this nucleus of visionary legislators, much remains to be proven.

“It’s easy to hold a press conference but hard to vote right. I’ve been very impressed with the willingness of Republicans like Scott Rigell and Reid Ribble of Wisconsin to say the right things. The question is, will they be willing to vote against their party’s leadership when it counts or are they just trying to look moderate in their districts in an election year?” (Time magazine, July 9, 2012) This is from Democrat Jim Cooper of Tennessee, the “elder statesman” of the group, which may account for his qualifying statement. Republicans Rigell of Virginia and Ribble both came to the House in 2010, and perhaps their freshman status accounts for their hopeful attitude.

Marching head on into the fray, the group, which is swelled by a few other representatives, mostly Republicans, is tackling a huge budgetary issue. Their first legislative cause is a brave thrust that has the chances of a snowball in hell, the No Budget, No Pay Act. The idea will resonate with their electorate, but not with their colleagues, the idea being “that members wouldn’t get paid, even retroactively, if Congress doesn’t pass a budget by October 1st. The group has been meeting regularly to figure out their agenda, and this is their first official piece of work together.”

Rep. Rigell has had a change of heart since he signed the notorious no-tax pledge trotted around by Republican lobbyist Grover Norquist. According to Joe Klein in his Time magazine column In the Arena (July 9, 2012), “Once elected, Rigell began to wonder about his vow never to vote for a tax increase. He did some research into the past 50 years of taxing and spending—and then he publicly reneged on the pledge, receiving a squalid earful from Norquist in the process.”

Klein reports the conversation he had with Rigell about the national budget deficit. Rigell has done the math and concludes that the current Republican refusal to consider revenue doesn’t reflect reality. (See the Time magazine article on page 26 of the July 9, 2012, issue.) To summarize Rigell’s computations, our government is consistently spending more than we are taking in.

Republican members of Fix Congress Now are headed for a dustup with their party leadership, particularly with the budget plan put forth by Paul Ryan, chair of the House Budget Committee. Ryan, a rising star in the Republican Party, is a formidable foe, but his widely discussed budget is gathering flack even from his own party as Americans discern its impact on various important constituencies—clients of Medicare and Social Security, veterans, and the poor—and thus on the election.

“President Obama’s lead against Romney more than doubles when the election is framed as a choice between the two candidates’ positions on the Ryan budget–particularly its impact on the most vulnerable. The President makes significant gains among key groups, including independents and voters in the Rising American Electorate (the unmarried women, youth, and minority voters who drove Obama to victory in 2008). This is an important new finding; highlighting the Ryan budget’s impact on the most vulnerable seriously weakens Romney.”

The members of Fix Congress Now may actually be closer to agreeing with liberal economist Paul Krugman, a vocal critic of the tax and regulation-cutting propensities of conservative Republicans. Paul Krugman took on Paul Ryan’s budget plan on ABC’s This Week.

“The plan’s a fraud,” he said on Sunday. “The plan is a big bunch of tax cuts, some specified spending cuts, basically for poor people, and then a huge magic asterisk which is supposed to turn into a deficit reduction plan, but, in fact, if you look at what’s actually in it, it’s a deficit-increasing plan.” Krugman has done the math, too. Isn’t it supposed to be the “pure” science, not subject to shading or manipulation? Perhaps budgetary “math” is different!

With the majority parties facing each other across a chasm, what chance does a small group of independent-thinking, solution-oriented House members stand, especially when they pitch the threat of a pay cut into the mix?

Perhaps it depends on how much support we give them.

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What can you do—you are only one person? True, but you are only “six degrees of separation,” on average, from any other person on Earth. You become powerful when you share information with your friends and ask them to share it with their friends—it becomes a global revolution. As Stephen King suggests in The Long Walk, when these “society-supported sociopaths” come, step aside, and find the strength to run…

Twelve-step programs have been credited with leading people away from addiction and back to accountability and productivity. But steps go both ways. This article is about a five-step program that leads to ruin. And it is our nation that is treading those steps.

The banking crisis of 2007-2008 was no accident. Decisions were made that had perfectly predictable consequences. Our financial institutions retraced steps that had led to the Great Depression, and when ruin overtook them, it was not because they were ignorant of the risks; it was because they chose to ignore the rules.

Rules—also known as regulations. Some people hate them. Instead of seeing them as a protective fence between themselves and likely harm, they see them as a threat to their independence and a brake on their ambition. And they fight them with every bit of their ingenuity.

One of the rallying cries this election year is that federal regulations are interfering with our economic recovery. The implication is that by removing these restrictions, business would pick up and there would be more jobs. Wall Street corporations have been particularly vociferous in calling for fewer regulations. How soon we forget!

Think back to the financial free-for-all of the Roaring Twenties. The year 1929 was most significant for the stock market crash that nearly wiped out the middle class and created poverty and despair for most of the nation. The entire banking system went bust. In response, Congress passed the Glass-Steagall. This act separated investment and commercial banking activities. At the time, “improper banking activity,” or what was considered overzealous commercial bank involvement in stock market investment, was deemed the main culprit of the financial crash. According to that reasoning, commercial banks took on too much risk with depositors’ money.”

Stability was gradually restored and the bad memories faded. The bankers and financial interests got restive and thought of ways to weaken the barriers between commercial and investment banking. The result was the 1999 repeal of Glass-Steagall and the implementation of the Gramm-Leach-Blilley Act, which allowed a broader range of banking services, including insurance and riskier investments.

The 1990s was generally a time of prosperity (after the savings and loan crisis of the 1980s). Then, in 2001, the Internet Stock Bubble burst “because investment banks promoted Internet companies that they knew would fail, resulting in $5 trillion in investor losses.” At the same time, derivatives, with their potential for instability, gained popularity, as officials in the highest levels of government resisted the call to regulate them. Bad decision! Even Fed Chairman Alan Greenspan was forced to admit he was wrong and apologize, but that was little comfort to investors who got burned.

Then came the Great Recession, from which our country is still struggling to recover. In 2010, a Democratically-controlled Congress passed the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act. President Obama was jubilant. He believed he’d just signed an end to financial corruption and laid a foundation for consumer protection.

But even before the ink was dry, lobbying money began to flow, and a systematic campaign was launched to gut the legislation. “The fate of Dodd-Frank over the past two years is an object lesson in the government’s inability to institute even the simplest and most obvious reforms, especially if those reforms happen to clash with powerful financial interests. From the moment it was signed into law, lobbyists and lawyers have fought regulators over every line in the rulemaking process. Congressmen and presidents may be able to get a law passed once in a while – but they can no longer make sure it stays passed.”

Matt Taibbi, who has written a series of superbly researched articles for Rolling Stone magazine, (including the above quote), on banking corruption, has analyzed the various methods unscrupulous financial interests use to weaken or destroy protective regulations. “That the banks have just about succeeded in strangling Dodd-Frank is probably not news to most Americans – it’s how they succeeded that’s the scary part. The banks followed a five-point strategy that offers a dependable blueprint for defeating any regulation—and for guaranteeing that when it comes to the economy, might will always equal right.”

In Part 2 of “A Five Step Program,” we will deal with each of these five points. Of course, the best thing would be to read Taibbi’s article in its entirety. We need to be aware of the forces that are systematically robbing us—both financially and politically. Knowing what is going on comes first.

One of the best ways to learn what is going on is to view Inside Job. Made in 2010, it received the Academy Award that year for best documentary feature. The film explores how changes in the policy environment and banking practices helped create the financial crisis. Exhibit A is what happened to Iceland during its own recent banking crisis. Iceland is the U. S. in microcosm—and that is disturbing. Follow us in Part 2.

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What can you do—you are only one person? True, but you are only “six degrees of separation,” on average, from any other person on Earth. You become powerful when you share information with your friends and ask them to share it with their friends—it becomes a global revolution. As Stephen King suggests in The Long Walk, when these “society-supported sociopaths” come, step aside, and find the strength to run…