A Wave or a Knee Jerk

It evidently is kosher in the political commentary world to describe recent US elections as Wave Elections, in which the wave goes the left and then to the right and then back to the left and on and on, citing the independent voters as a growing phenomena that now controls the political destinies of both the parties and the nation. Whichever way the independents think the wave should go; that is where it goes.

So a part-time cynic might respond: "So, national politics and policies are now controlled by a minority of people who either never took the time to form a real opinion or make a deep analysis of reality and, thus, vote how their gut, instead of their commitments/principles/conscience/convictions tells them to vote. But, hey, let's get rid of the part-time guys and go to the full-time cynics. What would they say? Well it might start out the same: "Our country has a significant minority of people who have no political/economic/social analysis or point of view that would guide their political leanings, i.e. a whole bunch of stupid people. But then, the analysis would change: This makes is easy for the corporate and financial sectors to control government to their liking and for their profit. And, it gets even better....for the corporate/financial sectors. These independents are actually getting the big head with many of them beginning to think that they have power when, in fact, they are dupes of larger interests who are pushed and pulled the way these larger interests want them to be pushed and pulled.

The thing about stupid people is that they don't ride waves as this would require some critical judgment about waves, when to get on, the dangers, the cost/benefit ratio, etc. What stupid people do is respond with a knee jerk to the latest stimulus and then try to explain the knee jerk with logic which is supplied by one or the other party or the folks who finance them.

So, for instance, the independents (those are the stupid people), they respond to the fact that we have a huge debt with the knee jerk reaction of opposing the current administration and giving power back to the folks responsible for approving the spending that brought us the majority of the current debt we have. The independents (since they don't bother with facts, because to have them would imply you have to organize, prioritize and then make sense of them) respond to high unemployment (which many of them only see as a fear, and do not experience as a reality) by giving power to the folks who did not want to save the auto industry and its jobs, or the financial sectors and its jobs, or the banks and its jobs. The cost, by the way, of saving these jobs and institutions which make a considerable contribution to the well being of our society is that the government made a profit while saving tens of thousands of jobs. When was the last time a Republican made a profit on legislation they passed. Okay, you are right, the Republicans have passed legislation that has enabled corporations to make huge profits, more than they deserve..but, I was referring to a profit for the government that, theoretically would benefit all of us not just a handful of us.

I will stop here, because, in fact, the independents are too easy of a target and they will always exist and we just have to learn to live with a lot of stupid people around. The downside is that there remains little chance that we escape the chains placed on our system and our lives by the corporate/financial sectors which can buy and sell both governments and independent voters by the dozens whenever they so desire. And, if the corporations find that they are feeling constrained they just get their lackeys in government, as recently happened, to pass legislation giving them free reign to buy as many independents as they please without any oversight. Carl Rove now is back in business.

The other side of the knee jerk is that sometimes it can become a tsunami, a wave really cannot, without an explosion beneath it. Take the second Bush term. That should have been a wave, but, instead it was knee jerk caused by, let me see, could it have been veterans who initiated a huge media campaign financed by corporations? Could have been. Well, after the tsunami, the corporations got disappointed with their lackeys on the right, so they brought in the left to save capitalism (that is essentially what Obama has done with the saving of the financial institutions that finance the corporations and, at no cost to the taxpayer. What costs the taxpayer, it can be remembered, are wars, military spending which is the other way that the government serves the corporate interests. But the left are lackeys that the corporations don't really trust - they just come in to clean up the mess the Republicans make of the economy now and then (balance the budget under Clinton and stabilize the financial institutions under Obama) and the left always goes too far with their salvation, such as regulations which would prevent the unconscionable profits of the Bush era in the future in favor stability.

Now, here's the funny part about the knew jerk. The media actually thinks it is a serious reflection of the will of the American public, parroting the winning political party's own self-delusion about their importance. It is not. It is laughable what the pundits are saying about the meaning of this most recent election. The only thing is means is that the corporate interests which control our state are worried that Obama will go too far in regulating their interests and maybe even forcing them to pay both for their mistakes and even make a hefty contribution to the common good. So, they finance the Tea Party which, ironically, rails against the influence of large, wealthy interests on our government (well, they did until they realized that they needed the money of these guys in order to mount a campaign).

So, let's see who the corporate folks want in 2012. If you are a democrat or a republican or a green or anybody which an organized mind capable of critical thought and can form commitments to principles/values, you are free to vote as your conscience/principles/convictions tell you to vote with the absolute assurance that however you vote it will contribute to the victory of the folks who control the knee jerk voters.

Giving the Match to the Arsonist

Seeing the results of tonights elections brings back the feelings that haunted me the night I watched the nationa re-elect George Bush six years ago. Why would you give the arsonist a match? but we did and the burning down of America continued. Now, just two years after the fire was put out, we do it again; we give the match back to the arsonists.

Thankfully, we have a president, and, evidently, a Senate that still believes in building not burning.

You should look at the exit polls: who voted for whom. Rich old white men carried the day. People who have lost jobs actually voted democratic in the majority. People who think they can make a lot more money voted Republican...they thought the same when they voted Bush back in and look what happened to their investments.

It is a night that proves what James Carville once observed when asked what he could make of the fact that there was an uproar from sectors of the nation in response to the news that President Obama would address children in an elementary school. Carver said, well we just have to get used the fact that we have a lot of stupid people in the nation. Indeed.

The question for the nation, by the way, is not the one that the news media seems to concentrate on tomight - what the election means for President Obama - but rather, what does the election mean for the American people, and, beyond that for the world in which we live because, despite Tea Party objections, we actually do need the rest of the world and they us for us all to prosper.

Well, I predict good things in the next two years, but not as good as they could be. While the Tea Party Republicans will treat the nation to a ton of Patriotic moralism, all of which amounts to nothing, the economy will grow and begin to prosper and we will end the war in Afghanistan, or at least take it down a notch or two in cost and we will make great strides in developing alternative energy like solar and wind and all our pension plans will get back more or less to where they were before Bush cut them in half with his half baked ideas of world dominance, unleashing the robber barons and tax cuts that bankrupted the nation.

This time, the firefighters will contain the arsonists so that they cannot burn the nation down again, so soon. Then we will see, in 2012 if the nation got any smarter.

For the moment it does not bode well on that front. To our credit, the voters didn't go for most of the really brainless canidates that the Tea Party servedu up to the nation, but they did go for the most dangerous ones like new Senators Rand Paul from Kentucky and Marco Rubio from Florida, both of whom gave special attention in their victory speeches to the fact that they believe that the United States is the greatest nation, not just now, but the greatest nation ever!!!! We could mention that that they provided no evidence and we know that they have extremely limited contact with the world outside of this hemisphere and that we lack clear criteria for what would qualify us for this accolade and that history demonstrates that most demagogues and dictators resort to this kind of jingoism to blind their followers as to what they really intend to do to the nation; but it would suffice to say that this statement is absolutely irrelevant to the the question of how to improve the current state of affairs in the nation in the world (they both agreed that there is something wrong in this greatest of all nations - this is called: having it both ways). I am quite sure that no one in the audience bought this attempt to manipulate minds and hearts and blind us to more pressing truths; becuase if they did, in any numbers, then we can see the real problem that we face: we have met the enemy and it us.