How long can democracy survive that only sometimes & then only partially enacts will of the people?

yurbud

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Thu Jun-17-10 12:32 PM
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Poll question: How long can democracy survive that only sometimes & then only partially enacts will of the people?

While the Obama administration is an improvement on the Bushies (hell, REAGAN would be an improvement on the Bushies), Obama's tactic for ''change'' has become all too clear: let the rich write their own rules in exchange for some concessions to the middle and working class.

So health care reform must force people to buy private insurance in exchange not excluding people for pre-existing conditions or kicking you off when you get sick, financial and Wall Street reform requires the input of the scammers who created the problem, and after trillions (when you add Federal Reserve loans to what Congress gave) are given to Wall Street scammers, the President and Congress talk about budget cuts for the working and middle class programs because Wall Street demands it.

On energy, the president gives five times as much money to alternative energy as his predecessor, but must also give loan guarantees to the nuke industry and open off-shore oil drilling to the oil industry that we already made a substantial donation to by invading Iraq.

On K-12 education, more funding can only come if it is based on the results of for-profit standardized tests, and the money goes to for-profit charter schools, and if it doesn't, the schools are subject to mass firings as a not so subtle way of busting the middle class teachers unions.

Our trade agreements favor the investor class completely and destroy the blue collar middle class by outsourcing their jobs and even white collar jobs like computer programming, customer service operators, and even corporate lawyering.

Rather than a responsive democracy, we seem to have a system where the rich let the working and middle class have just enough to keep us complacent, but that ''just enough'' keeps getting smaller and smaller.

The trajectory of the Democratic Party seems to be going the same way. As the Republican formula of relying on the religious right and white racial resentments to get their votes to enact their corporate agenda is becoming less effective, rather than offer a different agenda, those at the top of the Democratic Party, the DLC & Blue Dogs in particular, seem to want to take over the job of carrying corporate water and only alter how they sell it to the public.

That seemed to work for Bill Clinton, but after the naked service to the rich of the Bush administration, people see through it and expect more--a lot more. Our awareness of what other industrialized countries have, what is possible, and the corrupt machinations going on behind the scenes is a genie that can't be put back in the bottle in the age of the internet.

The other revelation of the Bush era that can't be swept under the carpet is that any assumption that the rich are rich because they are smarter, harder working, or morally superior was shattered by the person and ''success'' of George W. Bush himself, a lazy, incurious, cruel degenerate, who it is becoming increasingly clear was not the bottom of the barrel of our financial elite, but a typical example, especially of their moral squalor.

Obama is clearly of the middle class, but he seems unwilling to use the power of his office enact irreversible change, like FDR did with Social Security and LBJ did with Medicare and Civil Rights, that would protect us and weaken the power of the wealthy to grind us into a pate they serve with crackers.

How long can a system survive when most of the citizens are aware that it isn't serving them but instead, an undeserving minority who were as likely to have inherited or stolen their wealth as earned it?