By Henry McRandall
WRISEUP.COM
A wide range of opinion polls suggest that the Democratic regime of United States President Barack Obama is headed for a bloodbath in November’s mid-term elections.
And as fearsome as the “alternative” is, the Democrats most assuredly deserve to get their asses kicked.
Barack Obama led the Democrats to a smashing victory in America’s national elections of November, 2008 on a promise of providing “Change We Need” and “Change We Can Count On.” They won the White House. They won a filibuster-proof majority in the Senate. And they won an overwhelming majority in the House of Representatives.
The Democrats themselves had never defined this exalted “Change.” But the Republican presidential ticket of John McCain and Sarah Palin certainly did.
For the last three weeks of the campaign, McCain and Palin shouted from virtually every rooftop in the nation that electing the Democrats would bring about a “redistribution of wealth.”
McCain and Palin specified that the Democrats would “spread the wealth around,” thereby reducing the horrific and growing gap between rich and poor in America.
In effect, the Republicans made the 2008 election a referendum on downward redistribution of wealth from the “Haves” to the “Have-Nots.”
And when the ballots were tallied it became clear that a vast majority of Americans had given the Democrats a strong mandate to do just that.
But whatever happened to the “Change” Barack and his foot soldiers had promised?
Instead of acting on that mandate, the Obama Democrats chose instead to accelerate the widening of the gap between rich and poor by throwing $24 TRILLION at the banks and the corporations and the billionaires and mega-millionaires who control those banks and corporations.
When you give something to someone that you don’t have to give, it has to come from somewhere and that tab is now coming due.
Americans can expect decades of government austerity after this second round of stimulus spending comes to an end, regardless of who controls Congress after next January.
That means less spending on Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, public education and a myriad of programs that primarily serve the poor and the working class.
But that reality is a harsh indictment not only of the Democrats but of America’s entire failed “democratic system.” Inevitably, the austerity will be even worse and the gap between rich and poor will grow even wider under a Republican Congress than a Democratic one. And those problems would both grow much worse still if the lunatic, right-wing extremist, racist, reactionary, rabid Tea Party snags control of that Republican Congress. And there wocertainly not be any redistribution of wealth from the “Haves” (the privileged minority) to the “Have-Nots (the struggling majority).
The grim reality is that as long as it costs upwards of half a mil just to run for congress, and as long as corporate funding and the corrupt influence of the corporate mass media dictate who gets elected, America will never again have a government that will put the legitimate needs of the poor and the working class ahead of the unbridled greed of the banks and the corporations and the billionaires and mega-millionaires who control both.
Perhaps a dose of real deprivation and despair is just what America’s poor and working class (i.e. – middle class) need to jolt them into uniting in common cause – regardless of race, colour, creed, ethnicity, gender or sexual orientation – and standing up against the common predatory enemy.