The end of the world as we know it
…will not take place immediately should batshit crazy Republicans sweep today’s federal elections, as is widely expected.
But it will take place. And today will be a major reason why.
Should Republicans take control of one house of Congress (or both), we’ll get a few predictable capitulations by Obama and the Democrats on issues where they needn’t cave, but mostly we’ll get gridlock for the next two years on a host of urgent interrelated crises facing the country: the faltering economy, the wars, immigration, energy policy. Heck, given the minority-rules procedures of the Senate, in which only one recalcitrant senator can prevent a bill from being considered, all it takes is one senator ideologically opposed to government doing anything to bring the legislative branch to a complete halt. Like Rand Paul, say, or Ken Buck or Joe Miller or Sharron Angle.
But the real danger, and the one for which today will be cursed by whatever generations are to come, is around climate change. Thirty-seven Republicans are running for the US Senate today. Every single one, Dino Rossi included, denies that climate change exists and/or is human-caused, despite complete, overwhelming scientific consensus. All of them are dedicated to stopping any efforts to ameliorate it. Some of them will win. Any one of them can do serious damage to the chances that our species, and many others, will survive the next century intact.
What can we do about it? Not a whole lot, at this point, but there are a few things. If you haven’t done so already, vote for Patty Murray, Suzan DelBene, Denny Heck, Rick Larsen, or whomever else is on your ballot that has a reasonable chance of keeping a Republican out of power. If you’ve already done that, check to make sure your friends have, too. If you’re so moved, go wave a sign or help with GOVT efforts.
Voting is never a real solution. But the time for advance organizing is over, and we haven’t done our jobs. These are the choices we’re left with. And tomorrow, we’ll be left to pick up the pieces, and maybe then enough people will sense enough urgency for enough crises that we’ll start to reclaim some of the power that’s been stolen from ordinary people in this country.
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By sgt_doom on November 6th, 2010 at 10:23 am
Deconstructing American Political Theater
Please allow us to look behind the curtain for a brief moment, and see what really goes on there.
When Bill Clinton was elected president the first time back in 1992, he was elected with a minority of the vote (only 40 percent, or thereabouts), thanks to the spoiler Ross Perot, who entered the campaign to draw away votes from President George H.W. Bush.
Why was this? Because Bush had failed to deliver N.A.F.T.A., and the banksters were annoyed. H. Ross Perot, heavily indebted to the banksters for funding, and extremely heavily indebted to the Texas democratic political machine for his education (nomination to the Naval Academy), his early out from his military obligation, and his fortune thanks to sweetheart government contracts, answered the call.
It is crucial to explain that Perot’s brother-in-law happens to be Ramsey Clark, President Johnson’s former attorney general and a member of the highly influential Clark family of Texas, a multi-generational political family not unlike the Bush family, but to a lesser degree.
Next the republicans take over the House and Senate in the next national election, so logically, they should put forth their strongest candidate against Clinton during his re-election campaign, but that isn’t the plan.
The plan was to keep their man Clinton in as president, therefore the weakest candidate, Bob Dole, is run against him and loses handily.
Now one cannot blame the economy on President Obama; the American economy was dismantled over the preceding 35 years, but Obama has resolutely continued the economic policies of Bush-Clinton-Bush-Reagan, while in reality what America required was a super-F.D.R. (Franklin Delano Roosevelt) in the White House.
Now their obvious plan is to continue with Obama for a second term, thereby realizing their economic program of control fraud. President Obama was a majority-elected president (unlike the weaker Clinton), and in a much stronger position for a second term.
The only way to circumvent their plan is to replace Obama with an authentic democrat and an authentic progressive.
To present an idea of the ease of their manipulation of the American airwaves: a typical “news interview” show features speakers from Peter G. Peterson’s Peterson Institute, or
Peterson’s Fiscal Times, or Peterson’s Concord Coalition, or Peterson’s America Speaks, or Peterson’s Peterson Foundation.
Also featured would be speakers from David Koch’s Cato Institute, or Koch’s Heritage Foundation, or Koch’s Americans for Prosperity, or Koch’s American Enterprise Institute or the jointly financed (Koch and Peterson) Aspen Institute.
This is a loose approximation of what passes for the American corporate media today.
This political theater, just as the ancient Roman circuses and gladiator games, is for the benefit of the manipulation of the masses, and the economic elites laugh at their little enterprise and the wasted energy it consumes.
[For those who cling to Santa Claus and their fractured fables, they can rest assured that the health insurance legislation (oddly referred to as “healthcare reform”) will be subtly disassembled, leaving in place only those passages which strengthen the control and power of the insurance and pharmaceutical industries. Further free trade agreements will be passed, hastening those remaining jobs being offshored and the continuing demise of what remains of the American economy.
Also, the Financial Crises Inquiry Commission has done remarkable work in uncovering widespread criminal malfeasance and should any justice prevail in the USA, their findings would cause members of the former Bush administration, and present Obama administration, to do jail time. But this recent election will almost certainly negate that event.]
Deconstructing Discrete Events
Back in 1996, a Defense Department analyst reassured the American public that their country was at least 25 years ahead of China in the area of missile technology, thanks primarily to our over-the-horizon missile targeting.
But by 1998, China was on parity with the USA due to the Clinton Administration’s handing that missile technology over to China. They claimed it was to make the Chinese feel at ease (what an absurd explanation?) but in reality they were promised by the Chinese that they would reveal the air defenses specs and data they were building for the government of Iraq.
Please note the ease which America rolled into Iraq a few years later, despite the fact that the American high tech was manufactured the same place as the Iraqi countermeasures: multinational production facilities in China.
When President Obama appointed Sonia Sotomayor to the US Supreme Court, he wasn’t doing it to placate the Latino vote nor the women vote, but because she had a favorable rating from the insurance industry, thereby utilizing her appointment as an insurance policy to convince the health insurance industry that, in the highly improbable circumstance that the health insurance legislation wasn’t disassembled in the intervening years, they had their (wo)man on the bench.
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