We have met the enemy and he is pretending to be us.
On issue after issue, polls show American voters want one thing by a large majority; but their political system delivers the opposite. People didn't want the Wall St bailout (over 80% polled). They wanted, and continue to want, an end to the pointless wars and a reduction in bloated, wasteful military spending. They wanted real healthcare reform instead of the corporate-controlled fraud they were given after a year of political theater. And now, by a greater than 60% majority in a Gallup/USA Today poll, they do not want collective bargaining removed.
Isn't it clear by now that the current political system does not care what the electorate wants? The GOP have nakedly gunning for the middle class for thirty years, while the Democrats have been walking away from defending that class since Clinton. For the middle class, our political system is nothing more than good cop/bad cop.
This diary is rather harsh; and I need to put that in context. I just returned from a two week vacation overseas in a truly democratic country. On this vacation, I wasn't chiseled by corporations, or nickel-and-dimed to death by fees. I unplugged from the news. When I plugged back in upon returning home, it was like getting hit with a bucket of shit.
I was unable to sustain the slightest bit of optimism about the future of the American middle class. I found Obama and the Democrats to be castrated frauds - POGOs - people who bounce around at their masters' commands. I found the GOP rank-and-file to be dangerous barbarian fanatics, stupidly cutting their own throats to enrich the oligarchs. Serfs well on the road to serfdom. I found our "media" to be a spewing fountain of foul lies and distractions. I know that few have the luxury I just had; but that is part of the problem. Americans are not permitted to see the decent, modest lives they are being denied. The propaganda ministry would never allow them to know what a rotten deal they have here.
So, good luck to the people in Wisconsin. Good luck to the unions. You need a bigger miracle than happened in Egypt. I will be rooting for you and trying to figure some way to make a difference. Thanks for everything. Thanks for weekends and child labor laws. Thanks for caring teachers. Thanks for a great life for the past fifty years.
Now on to the negativity.
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America has become the biggest, most corrupt kleptocracy on the planet. It is laughable to call this country a democracy after the Citizens United decision. It is laughable to call it a democracy when the Koch brothers manufacture political parties out of thin air and pay off governors to give them no-bid contracts. (Governors stupid enough to get punked by phone.) It is laughable to call it a democracy when two so-called "justices", Scalia and Thomas, give brazenly political speeches at Koch brothers' events while Thomas fails to report his wife's income on a SCOTUS form, as required by law. It is laughable to call this country a democracy when the GOP passes un-repealable super-majority legislative rules whenever it grabs a legislature.
The rich and powerful laugh at the law. They piss on the law; they smash the law. Then, they walk away with our money and our rights.
Until Krugman's column today, the obvious relevance of the "shock doctrine" to our domestic political situation was simply not being reported by the corporate media. Wall St. corruption, with the collusion of POGO politicians of both parties, caused the shock; but Wall St. was made 100% whole with taxpayer money. Now, as the results of that massive looting affect our government, the shock doctrine is being put into operation - demanding the destruction of collective bargaining and the privatization of schools and other government services. History is being rewritten in front of our eyes. The Wall St. orgy never happened. This is all the fault of greedy workers. Geez, its Stalin and those dirty Kulaks all over again. And the peasants are falling for it. Paging Rev. Niemoller. Paging George Santayana.
George Soros is right. Our media is Orwellian. Its narrative for what is going on is pure propaganda. Witness the ludicrous article in the NYT, four days ago, where one obscure blogger's single sentence (with four corrected misspellings) was used as a "fact" in a paper of record. Even at the most prestigious corporate media outlets, there is not the slightest inclination to tell the truth - unless the lie is too obvious to get away with.
The truth is that raw political and economic power is being exercised by corporate thugs and their politician puppets. We are on the verge of a fascist-style destruction of collective bargaining and other basic rights. Women's rights are under constant assault. Separation of Church and State is in tatters, with the Air Force letting fanatical Christian fundamentalists haze and pressure cadets. The GOP are insane, and Obama is doing jack-shit. (Oh, right. At this particular moment, he decides to do something about DOMA. Gee, thanks. That's really the top priority in the middle of all this union busting. And who cares how many CEOs and former Wall Streeters he continues to appoint to positions of authority?) He is doing jack-shit because he, like more than half of elected Democrats, are POGOs. They are bought and paid for.
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Many people have compared the events in Madison, WI to the events in Cairo, Egypt. My concern is that, soon, in a redder state than WI, we are more likely to see events comparable to those in Tripoli, Libya. There, brutal mercenaries from Eastern Europe have no compunction about shooting and bombing whomever they get paid to kill.
Meanwhile, in America, Obama has continued all the Bush policies of hiring Blackwater/Xe mercenaries for our useless wars. (Witness the Ray Davis clusterfuck in Pakistan, which ties into the fact that Blackwater still has domestic bases.) We have private prisons - which actively lobbied the lunatic governor of Arizona to write her "papers, please" law for their profit. The GOP have at least 15 shots on goal (i.e., states) to destroy public sector unions. Most of those shots will be in states less polite than Wisconsin. I shudder for what is on the horizon.
Money is out of control in this country; and it is privatizing the instruments of violence. It has the legal right to buy elections, buy the SCOTUS, and hire mercenaries, rent-a-cops, and private jailers. The current political system will do nothing about money except further its ends.
The NON-response of Obama and most other national Democrats to the coordinated GOP ( a wholly-owned subsidiary of Koch Industries) assault on the middle class, and Obama's active lobbying from day one for the Billionaire Boys Club's (Gates, Broad, Walton) assault on public education and teachers unions, proves that. That non-response has finished any loyalty I felt towards the Democratic party as a whole. I still support those few REAL Democrats, but not the POGOs.
I am in the camp that if we lose in Wisconsin (even if losing is only that Koch gets a low-ball, no-bid takeover of the public utilities, with the ability to sell power at whatever rate he chooses) we are pretty much finished as a first-world country. (I already noted above that we are no longer a democracy - the institutionalized divergence of opinion polls and political outcomes I mentioned above proves that.) But, democracy aside, you can't be first world with no education, with zeroing out science budgets in the Federal government, with the deliberate, unwarranted cancellation of desperately needed infrastructure projects, like railroads (FL, OH) and tunnels (NJ), and with the monopolistic, ripoff privatizations of public infrastructure for pennies on the dollar. These are the actions of third world kleptocracies; and that is exactly what America has become.
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Having said all that, WTF can I really do? Yeah, send money - but isn't that how we got into this mess in the first place? If I can send one dollar; Koch can send $100 and not miss them at all. We tried marches - the media ignores them. They are ignoring Wisconsin as I write this. It is buried under Libya, New Zealand - whatever overseas events can be plausibly beaten to death to distract from what they are doing to us at home. If the corporate whores talk about it at all, it is to scapegoat unions, governments, teachers, and liberals.
So, we seem to be down to direct action - like occupying state legislatures. And that can't work for long. Some less stupid GOPer POGO governor will simply surround the legislature with police or rent-a-cops BEFORE he starts his push to union-bust. Meanwhile, the national GOP is intent on dropping a government shutdown bomb into this mess, further increasing the chaos and increasing the chances for a police/military intervention into domestic politics under the same kind of phony reasoning that has been behind every crooked POGO move in the last four years.
We are down to our last bullet here, and I am not very optimistic. It seems like the country is going to have to learn the hard way that democracy and concentrated economic and military/police power are totally incompatible.