More pausing...
The witless Left keeps being flabbergasted as to the Right’s irrationality. What foolish and shrill ineptitude to be so diverted. The Republicans, with few dissenters, are willing vassals and allies of their corporate and uber-rich masters. The Democrats are the occasionally reluctant henchmen, but henchmen nonetheless. Where’s compromise that TRULY benefits the middle class going to come from that? The pseudo-liberal class (there’s really no functioning liberal class as a whole anymore) would probably do better for its occasional delaying actions against corporate power to become belligerent and defiant.
James Madison, who envisioned political compromise as the norm that would keep our democracy safe because no one group could get too much power, would likely be depressed at today’s spectacle.
Well maybe not completely at the Democrats, who are still sleep-walking that rational government is going to be possible with the current crowd. But Madison WOULD be about the Republicans, unless something changes, for he would find them even more intractable and self-centered than the Federalists of his own time. As Charles Babington of the AP reported on July 4, 2011, Grover Norquist for almost three decades “has been driving the Republican Party toward an ever-more rigid position of opposing any tax increase, of any kind, at any time,” as well as opposing repealing ANY tax breaks (even temporary ones or ones that don’t make any sense anymore), credits, and favors for billionaires and corporations. By dint of money backing and relentless one-mindedness, he has brought Republicans into line, to where they will knowingly hurt the economy to help themselves and their corporate masters.
In 2003, Norquist, who has been the lightning rod of the Republican Party, said that if a Democrat becomes President, “we will make it so that a Democrat cannot govern as a Democrat.” That has certainly occurred. Even though every bipartisan budget deal in the last 3 decades has had both spending cuts and revenue increases, and even though Obama’s had it on a 2 for 1 ratio ($2 in cuts for every $1 in increased revenue), the Republicans were willing to tank the economy rather than have ANY tax increase or tax break repeal of ANY kind. Deval Patrick, governor of Massachusetts, says it’s a Republican strategy to “drive America to the brink of fiscal ruin and then argue that the only way out is to cut spending for the powerless.: And so “the burden of paying for our society shifts disproportionately to the middle class and working poor.” This after the Republican party for 8 years paid for two wars and a costly prescription drug benefit (that benefitted drug companies most of all) with borrowed money, because the government had been drastically underfunded by tax cuts for the rich.
As Jim Hightower has put it, the only way someone would pay heed to the Koch brothers’ “Save-the-Poor-Billionaires crusade” would be if that person was in denial or delusion about the above.
Both parties are complicit in the disintegration of our civilization, and I have little to no faith or confidence in prospects for those parties, but I agree with disgusted Republicans David Stockman and Mike Lofgren that their party not only deserves the lion’s share of the blame, but their party’s present stances are unconscionably ruinous—and perhaps traitorous.
If these “Occupy” protests can grow enough, and maybe resume in the spring, maybe they can force the creation of wholly different thoughts about economics, single-member districts, cooperation, participation, work, etc.
Because the present paradigms are unsustainable and self-destructive.
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