Michael Lissack material features, its central core exists only as a pattern of signals mirroring the ebb and flow of capital. Alvin Toffler, in his Powershift phrased it, “The growing complexity and speed of change make it difficult to govern in the old way. It’s like a com- puter blowing fuses. Our existing political decision making structures are now recognized to be obsolete.” We have an eighteenth century government struggling with a twenty-first century reality. One might think of ours as a dual political system. First, there is the symbolic political system centering around electoral and representative activities including campaign conflicts, voter turnout, political personal- ities, public pronouncements, official role-playing, and certain ambiguous presentations of some of the public issues that bestir presidents, governors, mayors, and their respective legislatures. Then there is the substantive po- litical system, involving multi-billion-dollar contracts, tax writeoffs, pro- tections, rebates, grants, loss compensations, subsidies, leases, giveaways, and the whole vast process of budgeting, legislating, advising, regulating, protecting, and servicing major producer interests, now bending or ignoring the law on behalf of the powerful, now applying it with full punitive vigor against heretics and “troublemakers.” The symbolic system is highly visible, taught in the schools, dissected by academicians, gossiped about by news commentators. The substantive political system is seldom heard of or accounted for. Interest-group poli- tics is tiered according to the power of the contenders. Big interests, like the oil, banking, and defense industries, operate in the most important arena, extracting hundreds of billions of dollars from the labor of others and from the public treasure, affecting the well being of whole commu- nities and regions, and exercising control over the most important units of the government. In contrast, consumer groups and individuals move in a more limited space, registering their complaints against some of the worst, or more visible, symptoms of the interest group-system and occa- sionally winning a new law or regulation. Finally, the weakest interests, like welfare mothers and slum dwellers, are shunted to the margins of political life, where they remind us of their existence with an occasional
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