It wasn't always this way, and it may still be possible to take the country back if we organize to rescind the structural changes that have been made. Issues are important, but progress on them is impossible when the only hands on the controls are an elite who bullied themselves into the position for reasons other than the well-being of humankind and the planet we're linked to.
What is painful to see is the world the next generation may find itself in. I have two lovely nieces just reaching adulthood.
Our interests and the interests of the elite are widely divergent. To the PTB, the destruction of the middle and working classes is not the end of the country. For these heirs of the attempted military coup against FDR, the programs which we consider the foundation underpinning a livable middle class are a deprivation of the "freedom" of capital. They don't see their wealth and power, the multi-national corporations, as dependent upon a representative U.S. gov't protecting their interests, as our survival is, or even as dependent upon a thriving economy. They can consolidate wealth and control resources (which is power) best in countries where everyone else is a desperate class of serfs and the gov't doesn't have the resources to regulate the use of resources in the public interest. They may not have more wealth than they would in places where the populace is fairly prosperous, but they will have ALL the wealth which is their motivating force.
Evidence of this is the absence of a push from the big corporate interests for large-scale jobs programs or a push for even the stimulus of single-payer healthcare, or any effort to rescue the real economy. They don't want a restoration of jobs until the jobs will be on their terms, ie. slave labor. They're not looting the country in advance of its economic collapse, but to CAUSE its economic collapse, and a big part of that effort was the ruinous Iraq occupation along w/ many other corrupt ways of siphoning the Treasury. I think this is the direction of Rahm Emmanuel's marching orders, whether or not he realizes it, as he attempts to court corporate capital for the Dems by aligning the party's goals w/ theirs.
I view all these acts of war against the middle class through the lens of what happened in the lead up to the bank bailout. Wall Street was in even more trouble than the insurance cos. are today. As Cheney and Summers prepared to tell Congress that the entire borrowing power of the Treasury had to be funneled into Wall Street institutions, they must have worried that the public would actually, physically revolt. They knew there was good reason to, considering the consequences for the citizenry.
They did two things. They had the Army Times run a piece I saw but didn't save. The Colorado Independent describes it thusly, "In September the Army Times reported that the 3rd Infantry Division’s 1st Brigade Combat Team — a unit based in Fort Stewart, Ga., that most recently spent 35 of the last 60 months in Iraq patrolling in full battle gear — would be put under the control of Northern Command, located on Peterson Air Force Base in Colorado Springs."
http://coloradoindependent.com/13321/elite-combat-brigade-for-homeland-security-missions-raises-ire-of-aclu From what I saw of the article, the brigade was to be trained specifically in crowd control weapons including the infamous sound cannon, and used to maintain order in the U.S. during "emergencies". (They didn't explain what was meant by that word.) About a week after Congress passed the bailout and civil unrest did not materialize, the article was removed from the Army Times website, and a retraction was put up saying that the training was to be used overseas. Since we've seen the sound cannon later set up at the G20 mtg in Pittsburgh, that's not entirely true.
At the same time as the populace was being intimidated, two members of Congress, Marcy Kaptur & Brad Sherman, reported that the WH liason personnel attempted to intimidate Congress w/ whispered threats of impending martial law including dissolution of Congress if the bailout were not immediately passed.
The additional looting of the Treasury to pay to subsidize out-of-control insurance premiums will be like an ongoing bank bailout all year, every year. Massachusetts, which tried a similar plan, was going under financially even before the economic crisis hit. The costs for this along w/ the wars and other ongoing corporate subsidies threaten both our currency, and the existence of a middle class in this country as the taxes needed to finance it, and the services lost in desperate budget-cutting, ruin family after family. The combined impact might very well cause the sort of runaway hyperinflation that Argentina experienced in the 1990's, as the Federal Reserve attempts to print enough money to keep afloat all the U.S. Treasury bonds that will have to be issued.
On bad days, my worst fear is that any mass uprising will be far from progressive. Since the MSM is for the most part blacking out what the real power equation is, the public is getting its understanding from the neo-con agenda provided to the teabaggers and from Fox News, and will blame the out of control costs on gov't "socialism", the poor, and corruption (implying the stolen money all goes into Dem officials' pockets). When our country is in a state of unrest, given the ongoing gen'l surveillance, our leaders could be arrested as "terrorists" before they can effectively get their message out to a large audience. When the leftwing was blocked in Arab countries what emerged were totalitarian Islamic regimes. If we get riots they are more likely to be in favor of some generals who say they will fix the corruption. The outcome would be a camouflaged military coup ala Pakistan, where the President remains in office, but Congress is sent home and the generals consult w/ the President instead. Or they will back civilian fascists masquerading as neocons who run against the insurance mandate and steal the balance of the elections needed for a ruling majority. In all this, the Democratic Congress, who merely went along, could be targeted as the fall guys.
I don't think the ruling elite actually expect a functional representative democracy to be in place in 10 years. They've never shown any allegiance to having one.
In the meantime if I can see that a bill is a final blow to our economy, I'm going to oppose it. If I don't go w/ the public interest on this, what the heck do I stand for?
It's so much easier to destroy a valuable institution than it is to maintain it. This is what's at stake w/ giant corporate handouts like the ruinous "healthcare reform" legislation, but, though most of the Dem Congress is uneasy about the lack of cost controls and favored better provisions, I don't believe we can convince them of the consequences.
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As I allowed these ideas to organize themselves in my mind this weekend, I turned to music for consolation. Perhaps I can make up to DUers for causing you to think about this stuff, too, by sharing w/ you, courtesy YouTube, my favorite Tracy Chapman song which offers support for living w/ integrity.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k4xJdv0CSDE
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