It's truly touching how much interest in America's great democratic experiment that our esteemed men and women of industry, finance, and commerce have shown in the 2010 midterm elections. Elementary school teachers across the land might lead civics lessons by pointing to these salt-of-the-Earth hedge-fund managers, oil tycoons, derivatives traders, and outsourcing zealots who are demonstrating such awe-inspiring civic mindedness.
Their love of Jeffersonian democracy runs so deep they're willing to invest millions of dollars in clandestine cash to fill the campaign coffers of some of the most extreme right-wing Senate candidates we've ever seen: Christine O'Donnell of Delaware, Carly Fiorina of California, Joe Miller of Alaska, Rand Paul of Kentucky, Pat Toomey of Pennsylvania, Mike Lee of Utah, Marco Rubio of Florida, Ken Buck of Colorado, Sharron Angle of Nevada, Ron Johnson of Wisconsin.
Since they're willing to spend so much money influencing the direction of the nation's politics might they also express this high sense of civic duty in paying their fair share of taxes at a time when their beloved country faces war and recession?
Who are these dedicated citizens who have recently shown such energetic civic engagement? They're Rob Collins of the "American Action Network"; Bruce Rastetter of the "American Future Fund"; the "60 Plus Association"; Steven Law of "American Crossroads"; Karl Rove of "Crossroads GPS"; Carl Forti, a Rove wannabe, of "Americans for Job Security"; Rupert Murdoch, Tim Phillips of "Americans for Prosperity," and Dick Armey of "Freedomworks." Paul Singer and others. And don't forget the Koch brothers and Thomas Donahue of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce who are aggressively reaching deep into hundreds of Congressional districts, drowning out local issues, and running attack ads against Democratic candidates full of lies, falsehoods, and innuendo.
Some citizens might wonder what these Republican fronts and cut-outs, stuffed to the gills with laundered cash from shadowy donors and outside groups, have to hide?
Maybe with double-digit unemployment in much of the country, and decades of misguided public policy that has given us the widest gap between the rich and everyone else in history, America's ruling elite is getting a little nervous that the Plebeians might sour on the beneficence of free markets. Today, about three hundred thousand Americans own about as much of the nation's wealth as do 180 million of their fellow citizens.
On the policy front, these civic-minded plutocrats will make sure that there'll be deep cuts in the safety net. The Frank-Dodd Act and Obama's health care initiative will be gutted. Like our illustrious Supreme Court under Chief Justice John Roberts, if the Republicans win Congress next week they will passionately support any measure that benefits corporations at the expense of ordinary human beings.
Wouldn't it be something if the Bin Ladens of the world funneled untraceable cash into Republican candidates' coffers because they know they can count on the GOP to continue the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, two of their greatest recruiting vehicles?
The press, like the Supreme Court, insists on promoting a false equivalency between labor unions and hidden corporate donors even though corporations and their industry associations are currently outspending labor unions 25 to 1. Besides, when labor unions participate in politics the electorate knows what they want, things like higher wages, better working conditions, health care, etc. and their members are working people known in the local community. When corporate behemoths and their front groups finance attack ads against Democrats do we really know exactly what they want? Kickbacks? Pork-barrel contracts? Lax regulations? Bailouts? War? Lost in cacophony of the horse-race press coverage are the policies that the Republicans are pushing.
If Americans continue to see their pensions shredded, home values diminished, tax dollars squandered on backstopping for Goldman Sachs and the boys, or thrown away on foreign wars, while their standard of living continues to plummet the time might come when the regular working people out there realize that these plutocrats can possess all the money in the world but couldn't produce a baloney sandwich without human labor.
This election cycle the corporate elites have spent more money than god railing against even the mild, market-friendly reforms President Obama got out of the Senate last year. Poor Obama. He never seemed to figure out that if your political opponents are going to denounce you as a "communist" a "fascist" and an "anti-colonial" Kenyan Mau Mau, you might as well give them something really to squawk about.
They want to keep people who work two or three jobs for about $7.20 an hour with not benefits and no set working hours in their place; they want to push wages down in the United States toward the level they pay their impoverished wage-slaves abroad.
The Oligarchy has kicked into high gear, exploiting the social dislocations of the Great Recession to disfranchise, pulverize, bat down, and crush the working middle class. They want to gut public institutions, take away worker pensions, and demolish the wogs' unions and voluntary associations.
In a period of Gilded Age inequality they're hitting us hard with the assistance of George W. Bush's Supreme Court and Karl Rove's underhanded political chicanery.
The economic meltdown that short-sighted "free market" policies brought upon us has now given the rich and powerful the opening to push their advantage more aggressively than ever. They're the same "Economic Royalists" that FDR denounced 70 years ago, only now they're richer, more sophisticated, vicious, and powerful.
Follow Joseph A. Palermo on Twitter: www.twitter.com/N/A
Total dem spending, is considerably more than the GOP.
The oligarchs' corporatist vision of America is vastly different from that of the Tea Party with their atavistic nationalism and folksy religiosity. Once the Republicans have power these two visions will collide and diverge. Tea Party will factionalize. The outcome will not be good for oligarchic retention of power.
Democrats should be ready with a platform of anti-plutocratic radical populism. I do not think they will be.
Man up, hunker down, shift sideways. Mad Hatter's Tea Party is mercurial.
Grand Old Party ain't sober.
Professor Palermo admits himself that in reality the policies of the Obama Administration are not very different from the Republicans when he states that Obama "might as well give them something really to squawk about." This, of course, will never happen. On the contrary, Obama is already signaling his intentions to increase cooperation with the Republicans after the election.
If this election cycle is testimony to anything, it is the remarkable speed with which masses of people have concluded, a mere two years after the Republicans were thoroughly repudiated in 2008, that Obama and the Democrats have nothing to offer them. Despite all the 'tea party' rhetoric, the cause of the coming Democratic party debacle is the collapse in Democratic party support as millions realize that they were had by Obama and the Democrats in the 2008 campaign.
In the end, millions seem to be saying, what difference does it really make which of these two factions of the plutocracy wins? The apparent coming collapse in support for the Democratic party portends the answer to that non-rhetorical question: "None whatsoever."
This will be proven once again when Obama significantly increases cooperation with the far right Republicans in the aftermath of the election.
They would if he did, but he hasn't and he certainly won't after this election. Ditto for the Democratic party as a whole.
It really comes down to whose interests the Democrats really represent. And if you 're not a Wall Street speculator, corporate CEO, banker or any other corporate interest, you really don't matter to the Democrats any more than you do to the Republicans.
Just as masses of people got fooled by Obama and the Dems in 2008, masses are going to be had by the right wing and so-called 'tea party' this time around. Thus, the Democratic party and Obama seem to welcome a Republican takeover of the House.
It will be interesting to see what happens in two more years. The Democrats and Obama obviously hope the ball will be back in their court after the expected 2010 election debacle next week.
One can only hope for more significant and serious developments come 2012 than the endless game of Two Square.
It will be interesting to