American Democracy: No More Illusions
By Sean Fenley
16 March, 2010
Countercurrents.org
Now that the wheels have fallen over Madison Avenue’s hope and change wagon, the Wall Street/more of the same express seems to have swung into full throttle! Frankly, I never got what other people saw in Barack Obama, he always seemed to me to be to the right of John Edwards — who ran as a liberal/populist but didn’t really have the record. Obama didn’t run as a progressive and he didn’t even try to fake the record; that he unequivocally couldn’t lay a claim to. More seasoned candidates with vastly superior records, of course, ran for the presidency, but thanks to the corporatist media and the least worst-ism of many progressive voters they barely made the needles jump at the polls.
But now that we are here today, at the present, one year at the eloquent lips and the unsteady hand of Barack H. Obama, we have a host of broken promises and incalculable number of efforts to placate virtually every constituency that exists in the known American political stratosphere! Two of Obama’s favorite pet constituencies, however, would seem to be the WEF (World Economic Forum) and the globalist aristocrats — after all he is their Frankenstein’s monster! And it’s become clear as day, that the sham of American democracy, is like a casino game that’s rigged six ways to Sunday! The two figureheads of the two corporatist behemoths, sling barbs, and invective back and forth at one another, and shovel multi-millions into propaganda spots that would have made Goebbels chuckle! And after there’s nothing left to sling and no more dirt to throw in their eyes, the masses pick the better budding Hollywood B-movie actor for a victory (it’s still not clear to me if Diebold even allows the American citizenry as much)!
A Pyrrhic victory it is, of course, dear reader, because to the ‘victor’ doesn’t seem to go the spoils, but instead a nearly identical list of policy and prescriptive approaches that were pursued by dear leader’s predecessor! Anyone who does not see this as the absolute 100% God’s honest picture, is either an eternal optimist, or has become part and parcel — one of the enablers — of the ‘great’ American political Punch and Judy charade! And as if this weren’t enough, now we are hearing, from the commentariat (or the even more laughable moniker for this sorry group of individuals, ‘pundits’, what they are pundits at, darts?, Parcheesi?, paper mache?, Mai Jong? no one seems to know! or care for that matter!), that the ‘grand’ Obama has tripped up very early on in his presidency and swung much too far to the left-of-center!
Well, with where the two major political parties in America stand on the issues, it can be close to nearly impossible to distinguish a political center! As a friend recently explained to me, the Dims have become the party of the military industrial complex and Wall Street, and the Republicans are more of a ‘populist’ uprising, neo-Ku Klux Klan esque revivalist movement really, representing the Chicago and Austrian Schools of Economics, folks who think that Obama is a closet Muslim born in Kenya, and Biblical literalistic Christians (who knew Jesus Christ was fan of Milton Friedman’s Capitalism and Freedom?). Not only does this bizarre kaleidoscopic menagerie coalesce into the exceedingly puzzling configuration of the contemporary right-wing in this country, but all those who don’t adhere to their helter-skelter, scattershot philosophy/program are labeled as hopelessly ‘elitist’ and/or ‘liberal’.
But getting back to the other half of the hapless duopoly, the Democratic one, they seem to have taken up nearly all of the classically Republican constituencies! To them liberal apparently means wantonly expanding foreign quagmires, bringing more and more Americans under the tent of the for profit health system, and willingly bailing out some of the wealthiest institutions in society; but leaving far less deep pocketed Americans in the lurch. Is it really a surprise then, when the uber slick, but ultimately jejune Senator Scott Brown was able to win election in the blue sea of Massachusetts! When ‘change’ translates to the Bushian agenda-lite, how can one blame the voters who say let’s put the genuine article into power! I’m reminded of the line that when the voter is given the ‘choice’ between a Republican and a Democrat imitating one, the Republican will win that ‘challenge’ every time!
These are the ‘choices’ in the political system of the American plutocracy, and they, probably not surprisingly, remind me of yet another old line that a lot of us might recall about democracy (well the U. S. doesn’t have that so strike that from the record). This line said that it (democracy) is the worst form of government, but better than all the others that have been tested! And that line brings us unequivocally to still another line, dear reader, which is about repeating the same formula again and again, but thinking that one can achieve different outcomes. And it is this line that is probably the most important one of all three of them; because, I’d wager that it’s fair to say at this point, that we’ve passed the point of no return, where we can hold on to the naive belief system that the U.S. still has the best system as compared to all the others that have been attempted!
Sean Fenley is an independent progressive who would like to see the end of the dictatorial duopoly of the so-called two party adversarial system. He would also like to see some sanity brought to the creation and implementation of current and future U.S. military, economic, foreign and domestic policies. He has been published by such websites as Pravda.ru, Online Journal, and Dandelion Salad.
