All I’m getting these days is gloomy email about how, as bad as things have been with a small Democratic majority in the senate, it’s going to get worse because the Republicans are headed for a big victory. That’s gloomy for progressives; the Republicans are rubbing their hands in glee.
The conservative billionaires seem to be doing a better job than the progressive billionaires.
So let me see. A substantial majority of the voting population are registered Democrats, as has been true for a long time. And I don’t what else that suggests than that the Democratic party identity as the discipliner of corporations and leveller of the playing field (as recently dramatized in Ken Burns’ “The Roosevelts”) is considerably more popular than the Republican one of hand’s off, free market, devil-take-the-hindmost. And yet the Republicans are headed for a big victory?
An even greater majority— 1% vs. 99% is not far off—have suffered not just since 2008 but since 1970 with stagnant wages and shamefully low minimum wages (while CEO salaries, as is widely known, have reached obscenely high levels), and a shrinking percentage of home ownership. The Republicans are the party that consistently fights raising the minimum wage and taxing the superwealthy.
And yet the Republicans are expected to win big?
Because the Republicans have been effective in preventing the current administration from enacting a lot of the progressive agenda that the majority of us want to see enacted, the solution is to bring in the p arty that has a whole other, conservative agenda?
Seriously?
The Koch brothers are spending a lot of money, but they aren’t locking us in our houses and preventing us from voting. We have the numbers. Or ought to. If we show up o n election day and vote simple, objective self-interest, the math is clear.
If we let ourselves be talked into the conservative, weak government agenda, we’ll deserve what we get. If we fail to understand what side our bread is buttered on, then we have only ourselves to blame.
The corporatocracy—the few over the many–can only exist when democracy fails to show up.
No Comments