Wednesday, November 3, 2010

The inmates are taking over the asylum

Well it's happened. Another flip-flop in the political scene. Again, voters have handed a stinging defeat to the party in power. The Republicans were in power in Bush's first term, lost out to the Democrats in 2006 and 2008, and now they are back.
As a teacher of mine once said, "Democracy does not always fill our hearts with joy."

If it is democracy. When one considers how much money was thrown into the races by the billionaires one has to wonder. All I can say is "Thank you, Supreme Court, for handing this country over to the oligarchs." People like the Koch brothers, who make their money from coal (good luck in the next couple years to you green-energy folks) poured millions in to these races. And they used their money to distract people from the faact that it was G. Bush's and the Republicans' profligate spending and two wars which created this deficit. They had eight years to mess thing up, and Obama and the Democrats so far have only had two to fix things.

But that very small percentage of the US which controls most of the money would have you forget that. They don't want the banks and Wall Street to be regulated. they want to keep on getting their incredible bonuses and profits. And in spite of their squawking about "socialism" during the health care debate, they will happily accept the small portion of tax-payer money they don't already have to be bailed out when things go south again.

So welcome to the United States of Oligarchy. It is becoming "government of the few, by the few, for the profit of the few." They will keep the rabble under control by creating false enemies and diversions so they will be too angry to think.

Say good bye to green energy, carbon control, net neutrality, and what's left of the middle class.

The Republicans talk about reducing taxes (and keeping that tax reduction the oligarchs got a couple years ago) but they don't say how. When Chris Matthews asked Rep. Marsha Blackburn of Tenessee just where they would make the tax cuts she smilingly stone-walled him. She said "across the board spending cuts" but wouldn't commit to including defense, for instance in those cuts. And she wouldn't rule out social security cuts. It's typical of these people to avoid the specifics. not having governed before, they have no real idea of what they are doing.

There were a few bright spots. Harry Reid kept his seat in Nevada (thank you Nevada, I retract all those snarky things I said about you) and the Democrats still have the Senate. That last is a pretty dim bright spot tho. The Democrats pretty much screwed up their big chance to govern wisely by making too many compromises and failing to explain their policies adequately to the public. Are they now going to develop back bone? One wonders, considering how so many Dems up for re-election ran scared and tried to pretend they didn't even know Obama. I'd like to know how many of those survived.

It'll be interesting to see how the Republican establishment controls the Tea party favorites like Rand Paul who managed to survive the elections.

In the meantime, I guess I better go down to McDonald's and see if i can get a full-time job, since they want to cut back my pitiful social security benefit.

Let's everyone give a warm welcome to the new puppets of the Oligarchy who will be taking over in January.

1 comment:

MickeyWhite said...

Excellent post about marsha my friend, she is the Stone-Walled expert.