If there is one thing that progressives and liberals have learned from Barrack Obama’s presidency that is disheartening to admit, it’s that the two party “establishment” is not going to produce a candidate for president that reflects the popular will of the country. Whoever gets the nomination from either the Republican or Democrat party is a carefully selected, groomed, vetted, financed, corrupted, and made marketable representative of concentrated power and private wealth. We the citizens may chose, realistically for president, every four years, one of the top two corporate sponsored candidates. There are significant differences, but this is only because we are given two bad choices, and a large number of voters feel like they are choosing between the lesser of two evils. “Hold your nose and pull the lever” has become a common image as to how our average voter feels when going to the polls.
The underlying reason people feel this way is because people understand that despite all the rhetoric about “hope” and “change” and “freedom” that is marketed in the name brand candidates every four years, there will be little change for the good and not much hope for anything different. It’s business as usual, once a candidate gets into office, especially true the closer the politician is to concentrated power at the top, such as the President. The only thing that seems to change is the concentration of the nation’s wealth into the smallest, elite percentage of society. Literally,what has changed in the past three decades is the measure of just how much more rich the rich have gotten, through a massive concentration of the nation’s wealth into the hands of a tiny percentage of our populace. With this concentration of wealth at the top, comes concentration of power. Given that our wealth disparity in this country is the largest it’s been since before the start of the Great Depression, it’s no wonder voters feel powerless at the polls.
One of the clearest, and easiest to understand examples of how broken our democracy has become, is the comparison of popular will with the reality of government policy. It doesn’t matter that a majority of the general public, regardless of their level of understanding of economic policy, are against the so-called “free trade” deals, such as the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) that was passed under President Bill Clinton. I remember seeing Bill Clinton on tv as the candidate for President saying something along the lines of how President Bush had promised to create jobs, but didn’t tell everybody that the jobs he would be creating would be overseas jobs. He was criticizing the outsourcing of American jobs. That was candidate Clinton. President Clinton fought hard for and eventually won the passage of NAFTA , pushing through congress a trade deal that lead to exactly what Ross Perot had warned of at the time, a “giant sucking sound going south,” the sound of American manufacturing jobs moving to Mexico. There were other consequences too, such as the destruction of Mexico’s small farming agriculture that was unable to compete with the newly flooded market of big U.S. industrial farms products that are subsidized by our government.
Candidate Barrack Obama was a vocal critic of NAFTA, pledging not to get us into any more trade agreement like it. Now President Obama has tried to “fast track” a similar trade deal, the Trans Pacific Partnership (TPP) to expand exploitation of Asian countries with a new supply of sweat shops. It doesn’t matter that the American public is against such trade deals. So far Obama has been denied the “fast track” option by congress, which is a technical term for a congressional procedure of a strict up or down vote on the massive trade deal without allowing for debate or amendments. It apparently doesn’t matter to President Obama that the public is still against the unfair “free trade” deals, as was candidate Obama. It doesn’t matter that the U.S. steel workers unions are against the trade deals, as recent deals with China and South Korea have lead to huge job losses here. It doesn’t matter that environmental groups and labor groups are against the trade deals. The trans national corporations are for it, and they sponsor both the republicans and the democrats on important matters.
It doesn’t matter that economists and the large majority of the public recognize the financial industry and housing bubble to be the culprit of the Great Recession. It doesn’t matter that candidate Obama recognized this either. President Obama gave the heads of Wall Street and architects and cronies of the financial crisis the job of fixing the crisis. It doesn’t even matter that President Obama pushed for more financial industry regulation, because by the time that legislation reached his desk for signing, it had largely been gutted of any teeth, thanks to the bribing of both political parties by the financial industry.
It doesn’t matter that the President, the majority in the Senate, and probably a majority in the House are in favor or raising the minimum wage. Big business is against it, and their money speaks more loudly in congress even when it is in the minority.
Astonishingly, it doesn’t even seem to matter than a clear majority of Americans like Social Security and Medicare and would like to see them strengthened. Mitt Romney and his running mate Paul Ryan were openly hostile to the programs, even pushing to want to convert Medicare into a voucher system for senior citizens. Even though this is a hugely unpopular idea, this “choice” for the office of the President came extremely close in the election.
Knowing what we know, and knowing how rigged our political system is, why are we already assuming that Hillary Clinton will be the next President? Why are much better Democrats afraid to put their name in the hat for 2016 until they find out whether or not Mrs. Clinton will run?
It appears that “change” and “hope” are now, truly cynical labels, and might as well be changed to “more of the same.”