It is important that we call out our sham and shameful politicians that "represent" us, particularly in the US House. We saw a rise of the gop (they don't deserve the respect of capital letters) through deceptive messages and downright lies. We need to spend the entire length of time until the election of 2012 to get the message out as to what they did to get into office and what they are doing now in office. The republicans use the tactic of stating over and over the same message that eventually gets accepted as fact--no matter if it's true or not.
My slimeball is the US Representative from the IL-17, Bobby Schilling. I wrote a piece for my local paper about this guy and how he lied about the great Phil Hare to get him ousted. This guy did not even live in our district when he ran. Anyway, here is my piece.
I hope people are now understanding the sham that was the election of 2010. Very wealthy people paid millions of dollars to convince the American electorate that the deficit was a detriment to the future of this country. The sham was not this fact; it was the fact that the GOP did not care about it while proclaiming otherwise. While scaring those who pay no attention to the day-to-day details of politics by using television ads, the only medium these people use for information, the electorate picked politicians who proclaimed that the ones in power were not getting the American people the jobs needed. Jobs won their elections via the deceptive ads of the newly powerful funding groups of Karl Rove and Dick Armey.
However, a rather strange phenomenon occurred last year. Corporations had an incredibly profitable year, particularly in the third quarter. The US Department of Commerce announced that American businesses had profits of an annual equivalent of $1.659 trillion, the largest total in the 60 years that the department has been tracking these numbers. So, are businesses hurting? Evidently, not—but workers are. The middle class is continuing to shrink because the manufacturing jobs keep getting shipped overseas and because of an attack on workers trying to protect their wages through unions.
Gov. Scott Walker of Wisconsin took a state that had no deficit problem and immediately signed more tax cuts for the wealthiest of his state. Now, there is a deficit problem. Then he went after the middle class by attacking the state employee unions, using the sham of deficits as a rationale. The uproar in Wisconsin is the result of people who slept through the 2010 election to find that not only do elections have consequences but not voting has consequences. And what did the GOP politicians in Wisconsin do after they inflicted their damage on the middle class? They high-tailed it out of the state, flew to Washington, D.C., and attended a fund-raiser at a major lobbyist organization called the BGR Group. This kind of behavior is occurring all across the country with wealthy puppeteers pulling the strings of these Republican governors and state legislatures.
What needs to be understood is that just because someone watches an ad or hears loud, screeching voices of uninformed people does not make one an informed voter. It requires time and energy to find the information as to what is happening. Take Rep. Schilling, for example. How many times did we see him have ads haranguing Phil Hare about a lack of jobs? Obviously, Schilling is going to fight for us and for our jobs, right? Schilling has exactly ZERO bills that he has written to help us out—ZERO. He has co-sponsored a total of 13 bills, and not one of them was a jobs bill. Yet, he has constantly supported corporate interests in terms of their profits—profits that evidently are not designed for jobs.
Wisconsin is working on recalling politicians who lied about their stances. Schilling was shilling for his new job with misrepresentation and intentional misdirection. Maybe Wisconsin is onto something. Hopefully, the electorate will be paying closer attention to the daily political matters. You may hate politics, but politics affect you every single day.
