Our political system =

As you know, I am more than just a casual observer of the political scene.  In fact, I have spent most of my life watching the comings and goings of our two party system.  As such, I don't claim that I am the most qualified to make some keen observations, just that I've seen a lot of things, for a lot of years and kept my eyes and mind wide open. 

Over those years, each political party seemed to have its own unique identity: 

• The Republicans being the pro-business party that, when things got rough, wrapped itself in the flag. 
  
• The Democrats being the pro-labor party that the Republicans were always trying to label by innuendo as being pro-communist.  
  

As voters who are basically forced by circumstances to choose a candidate from one of those two parties, you should be aware that, due to a trend that has taken place over the past several years, things aren't as they seem.  After the cold war ended, the word communist lost its power to scare and the Republicans had to look for new boogymen to go after.  They thought they found it when they replaced the word communism with socialism, hoping it sounded vaguely like communism, but with no cold war going on, that didn't work. 

The current GOP/corporate strategy seems to be to attack every Democratic initiative individually, using the same scare tactics they used during the cold war when they painted themselves as the patriotic bulwark against communism.  They did their dirty work by reducing every Democratic initiative to a derisive slogan and elevating every GOP protected species and sacred cow to a glorifying slogan, healthcare legislation = Obamacare, job offshoring corporations = job creators.  If you think that this tactic makes the Republicans seem like they are the only bad guys, read on.

The Democrats forgot who really put them in office when President Obama, with the huge momentum of a solid victory that was a repudiation of Bush and Republican policies, threw away that bully pulpit by stating at the outset that he's “everybody’s President.”  Well “everybody” didn't elect him, we did!  When he spent the next three years trying to “compromise” with the GOP, he was “compromising” our futures and our families.  That “compromise” lowered the bar in negotiating with the Republicans and allowed them to set the agenda!  If you think that the whole thing looked like a fixed boxing match, you could be right.  

If you take away nothing else from this, I want you to realize that the extreme posturing of the GOP electeds  made the apathetic indifference to their REAL constituency of the Democratic electeds look benign by comparison.  All of that reminds me of a boxing match where the champion is “asked” to throw the fight by an unnamed “benefactor.”  Corporate backers?  Wealthy backers?  Who knows?  The evidence is circumstantial.

We now find ourselves smack in the middle of an election year.  We are being held hostage by the “lesser of two evils” meme that's been spewed out, ad nauseam, by numerous O-pologists!  Until unions and other groups step up to the plate and sponsor their own candidates who are NOT part of the rigged duopoly that is basically corporate America's surrogate in government, we are doomed to living with and by the dictates of America's real rulers, corporations and the rich!

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