"Your lupins, or your life!"
Dennis Moore, Dennis Moore, riding through the glen,
Dennis Moore, Dennis Moore, without his band of men.
He steals from the poor and gives to the rich!
Silly bitch! Dennis Moore, Silly Moore
-Monty Python's Flying Circus
Since 1980, the Republican Party has brought about the most massive redistribution of wealth, from the lower & middle classes to the upper class since the era of the Robber Barons (Carnegie, Vanderbilt, Rockefeller), and perhaps more than at any other time in American history.
The earned income of average Americans has been stagnant since the end of Clinton's term, and ever since "Shrub" (W) tax cut - massive shift to the upper class, most of us have watched our spending power, job security, and benefits decline. VOTE IN POLL, BELOW
and what we have learned since we elected President Obama, a "filibuster-proof" 60-seat majority in the Senate and a large Democratic majority in the House is that there doesn't seem to be a damn thing that our side can do about it.
Now, the Republicans are campaigning in 2010, with the complaint that the Democrats haven't fixed the economy, that they haven't created jobs. Yes, the right-wing has the audacity to claim that they are on the side of working people, and that they will bring prosperity back to the middle class.
And there doesn't seem to be a damn thing that our side is ready, willing, or able to do about it.
Because Harry Reid and Barack Obama and the Senate Blue Dogs are not willing to take the risk to suspend the filibuster during this economic emergency.
They think that they're playing it safe. They still seem to be guided by the ghost of Tom Daschle, he who piously claimed to believe in "good government," but was actually setting the tone for years of spineless pseudo-leadership by his only slightly less impotent successor.
Whether or not Daschle's lame-brained incompetence and that of those who followed, combined with the insensitivity of the Administration's economic team to the plight of the working class is to blame is of little importance now. It's nearly too late. Barring an economic miracle, we are going to lose whatever semblance of Congressional power that we now have by January, 2011, only 6 months from now.
It's not even clear that any Congressional action after the July recess can have a meaningful effect on the American economy before the election. Maybe it can, but we're probably still looking at a 9.5% unemployment rate in November, and as Carville has pointed out, "It's the economy, stupid." It's ALWAYS the economy.
What can the Dems do? Nancy Pelosi is right on, in pointing out that we have no chance as long as the Democrats in the Senate allow the Republicans to continue to block action by using arcane rules like the "hold" and the filibuster in the abusive and extreme way that they have. If we who support the Dems are the "good kids" on the playground, the republicans are the proverbial "bullies," and they have been kicking and scratching and bloodying us, and worse, for day after day and year after year, and we are too stupid or cowardly to do anything about it. After awhile, even taking some pride in being "good" in some clean-spirited way, we start to hate ourselves for taking this crap, and to feel utter contempt for our cowardice. If our grandparents had acted the way we are acting, the Nazis and their allies probably would have won World War II. Actually, if we had been so cowardly then, FDR would not have been able to function as the strong President that he was, and perhaps it would have been people like Prescott Bush and those who tried to persuade General Smedley Butler to run the government, allowing them to continue profiting as they were from the right-wing machine in Europe.
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Ross Perot was right - there was a "giant sucking sound," but most of us were too deaf to hear it, too blind to witness it, until it was too late. And his opponent, our beloved Big Dog has admitted that he was duped into allowing it all to move forward by Robert Rubin, Larry Summers and others who went along with Greenspan, Texas Senator Phil Gramm and their ilk, to put the fox in charge of the hen house - they let the corporations run completely wild and take complete control of the media, the financial industry, and everything else.
Of course, the Monica Lewinsky affair and Clinton's first two error-prone years in office put him in a vulnerable position, with a Republican-controlled Congress for his last 6 years.
Thus, from 1980 until 2009, The Republicans were in effective control of White House &/or Congress for 28 of those 30 years.
During those 30 years, things went from bad to worse for most working Americans, and from the standpoint of our national debt, except during the Clinton years (there was a recovery during the 1980s, but only because the Republican Administration "borrowed and spent" Trillions of Dollars, which you and I have to pay the interest on - and we have been paying the interest on that national debt for over 20 years.