You cannot expect reasonably for sanity to prevail in our politics. The uber rich have already won the class war, and they're systematically dismantling the middle class. Basically America had one great economic run-up that established its uber wealthy class, and then the entrenched wealthy class started rigging the system to hold that wealth and the status quo.
I don't mean to depress, but the fix is in, and so "the new reality" as that fantastic questioner of Obama last week said, the new reality is that we have to focus on our own well-being, including that of our family and friends, to still fight the good fight, but not become insane ourselves by becoming delusional about what's going on around us.
The pernicious facet of the new reality is that we have to accept that "the new reality" rigged by the super wealthy requires millions of people to suffer, 1 in 7 Americans to be in poverty, the decline of the middle class and our kids having less than we and our parents had, and for economic opportunity to continue to decline and become ever more elusive. If you can find peace with that even while fighting it, then you're doing very well. And I encourage all my friends to make peace with that, for their own well-being.
I've been racking my brain lately trying to secure myself financially in the middle class and reduce some economic anxiety of my own. It's really frustrating. On the one hand, I see so many wealthy people around me, people who don't deserve to be wealthy, and yet that is precisely the nature of entrenched wealth - it's almost always not deserved on the merits of character. They don't deserve it.
I think I read recently that our national wealth gap is now on par with Ecuador. That's no accident.
I was just reading this morning a crazy idea being pushed by the crazy right - a national sales tax to replace the tax code. Many crazy right politicians advocate that. Can you imagine anything more regressive or more evil - I mean that is precisely designed to be a funnel for concentration of wealth at the top. And they're selling this b.s. to people who can be hooked by hatred, by hatred of "outsiders," which are currently defined as non-Christian, non-White, non-Straight, non-Privileged, and non-Citizens. It's pure evil. Pure evil - the exploitation of others' weaknesses for personal gain and pleasure. It's the laughing Devil.
ALL of the policies you hear being advanced (and smokescreens put forth) by Republican interests are designed exclusively to concentrate wealth at the top more and more, to abolish the middle class, and in their world, turn society into the "deserving" and the "undeserving" in their warped minds.
Listen to their language - deserving and undeserving - that's their world view. To them, they "deserve" what they have, and so any efforts to help others or any things that merely benefit others they see as feeding people who are undeserving not only of help, but of anything. Because, in their minds, if other people were deserving, they too would have what the wealthy already have. It's economic divine providence. It's wicked and warped.
The uber wealthy interests will continue to debase our politics to third world levels and to fund the crazy Tea Partiers -- because over time winning races and having big money backing lends credence to their ideas in the public. This is the revision of the 2000 Steve Forbes effort writ large. What you are witnessing, I believe, is classic Freudian projection by billionaire hedge fund manager Steve Schwarzmann, when he accused Obama's treatment of Wall Street as being like "the invasion of Poland by Hitler."
No, the invasion happened by Wall Street and their constituents and their mercenaries in congress against the middle class, and they're winning, and I don't see how they don't continue to win. There is no organized nor capable opposition. And there can't be, because the board is stacked on all sides by big money. There are good players, no doubt, but they're playing on a stacked board. It's right there in plain sight to see, if the darkness of the truth doesn't blind you.
I'd love to be surprised to the contrary, and like I said, we should still keep up the good fight, as a matter of principle and character.
This president perhaps wasn't ready to be president under these dynamics, and it's extraordinarily disillusioning. He has been captured so far by the wealthy interests, afraid of the mantle of change on which he was elected. He can still turn it around, and I expect will be re-elected in 2012 with Democratic congressional gains, similar to '84.
But Obama and his crew have made many of us in his base feel unappreciated. Moreover, whatever losses happen, Democrats scared of their own shadow will interpret congressional losses not as a failure of them to stand up for principle and win their base, which it is, but rather as their failure to be Republican-enough. We see that in their failure to take up the the Obama tax cuts bill last week. Unbelievable.
Sanity in politics has a long record of not prevailing. The trajectory away from sensibility deflected and the fate was sealed with the election of Bush in 2000. That was the moment when 20 years of sustained economic attack on the middle class and government went viral, attacking any regulatory or legal immune system that was once in place. It's nauseatingly ironic that the HIV virus that killed so many thousands of my brethren took hold at the same time this economic virus was being set loose with the same nature. Now there's nothing to stop it in full force 30 years later, taking its host down, decimating the middle class.
Enjoy the little things... Love yourself and your family and friends... Keep up the good fight... Don't fear dark truths but do let them fuel the fight... And find and enjoy your pleasures -- they matter more than ever... Keep yourself sane.
[Revised. Changed title to eliminate duel. Softened some Obama criticism.]