Who Wants Controversy? Let's Talk Politics Politicians are all noble. There is no corruption in modern politics. The American system of government is a smooth, efficient machine that runs without flaws. Now do I have your attention? These are some ideas that politicians would love for us to believe. However, let's examine the facts, shall we? In our perusal of political corruption and fallacy, we shall cover three topics. Lies, leeches, and losers. The first category, political lies, will cover the purposeful misinterpretations of data that the government willingly slings forth to the public in order to disguise their actions and muddy the truth. The second topic, leeches, deals in the domain of campaign finance deceit, and how corporations and private interests groups are buying American politicians. The third topic, losers, deal with the politicians themselves, the ones who willingly take advantage of our skewed system.Lies. Start with the unemployment rate. According to Martin Gross (Gross, 22), the government boasts an unemployment rate of only 5.4 to 5.7 percent. At that rate, almost everyone in America has a job. Now, let's look at the true figures. The government neglects to add 1.7 million people who are without a job, and without unemployment insurance. In other words, they aren't counted because they didn't look for work that month. 409,000 people looked for jobs over the last year, but not that month, and thus they aren't unemployed either. Five million heads of families are on the welfare system, yet people on welfare are not considered unemployed. 4.1 million people are part-time workers who want a full-time job, but can't get one. 2.1 million are temps who work only that month, yet they are considered fully employed as well. So, where does that lead us? Altogether, this adds up to around 18 percent of Americans without a job, possibly the worst rate among the Western industrial nations. Lies.Lee...
