I used to be the guy everyone here used to love to hate. I voted for Bush in 2000. I was a Freeper -- a frequent contributor to Free Republic. I even gave money to Rick Lazio when he ran against Hillary for NY Senate.
Fast forward... I'm now a fervent Obama supporter and a staunch enemy of corporatism.
What happened to me?
Don't get me wrong -- I was never a full-fledged wingnut. I've always been socially liberal. Pro-choice, pro-gay, etc. But I couldn't stand the Democrats' fiscal policies and was willing to grin & bear the religious right because I believed in small government & low taxes.
You know what they say... be careful what you wish for. My transformation started several years ago, when I started hearing about some of my I.T. colleagues losing their jobs to workers in India, who could work for pennies on the dollar. At the time I lived in Charlotte, NC, and Bank of America is headquartered there. They started setting up entire operations in India while handing out pink slips here in America.
I was never personally affected by outsourcing because I always worked for small companies. But I pulled every dime out of BofA, and wrote a letter to their CEO. I saw the practice of outsourcing as a microcosm of a much larger problem -- corporate greed run amok.
And look at where we are today. In 1980, CEOs earned about 40 times the average worker. By 2004, that ratio increased 10-fold. We have corporations folding left & right: Countrywide Mortgage, Merrill Lynch, Lehman Brothers, etc., yet their CEOs raked in HUGE packages as recently as this year.
The cold, hard truth is that the "free market" is out of control. The endgame of the road we're on is full-fledged class warfare, with the gap between rich and poor becoming larger & larger. And for what? So a tiny percentage of Americans can make offensive sums of money.
The chickens have come home to roost. If corporatism can make someone like me do a 180-degree turn, it should do so for any thinking person. I suppose that's the problem -- too few of those out there. If this election is lost due to high turnout from ignorant, racist, and uneducated people, I fear for the future.
Meantime, I'm going to keep working and hope that the Lehman Brothers CEO's $22M bonus trickles down.