By Steve Hynd
I truly believe there's no more important domestic political issue today than that of massive income inequality in the United States - that of the fear-laden, faux-democratic wage-serfdom in which Americans have become accustomed to serving their elite, corportatist, neo-feudal masters. If it cannot be fixed, then so much else cannot be fixed.
If it cannot be fixed, forget the economy; the elite is making record money while the rest of us feel out fingertips slip on the financial cliff edge. Forget rolling back a hubristic and interventionist bipartisan foreign policy which rides on the back of that elites' convictions of exceptional moral superiority. Forget de-linking the current deplorable linkage between employment and healthcare, or between employment and starvation, or between employment and homelessness because none of the elite feel the fear of income collapse they use to keep the masses malleable. Forget putting a stop to the hollowing-out of the middle class and all that accompanies it. Forget so much of what has been called "the progressive agenda" by the elite's shills but is really just the humane and civilized of doing things in a nation where there'd be plenty to go around if the super-rich weren't hoarding it all.
Yet despite my believing all of this, I'm not one who prophesizes the utter collapse of America into a Mad Max wasteland if it isn't stopped. And despite all the people who have said that collapse was forthcoming soon in the past couple of decades - reaching a crescendo during the Bush years - it hasn't arrived yet.
That's because the elite has been reasonably adept at making sure the pain of poverty was enough to keep the working cattle down, but not to break them or the neo-feudal system entirely. A terrible 46,000 people die every year for the lack of healthcare, but that's not enough to bring everything to a halt. Twelve million American children are going hungry, right now, but you might win the lottery, right? They keep us doped with the right measures of fear, hope and television dreams.
Perhaps the greatest perpetuator of the system of all is the democracy theatre that goes on every two years when we're asked to choose which set of elites will become our lawmakers and help their brethren continue to rip us off on a bi-partisan basis. As soon as one election ends, campaigning for the next begins and we're always told that the coming election is the "most important evah!" Thus we're invited to pick sides and support them partisanly, like football teams, through thick and thin. Our fierce partisan support only serves to conceal the fact that, like football teams, the two main political parties are engaged in doing the same old things in the very same old ways - and most importantly, just like football teams, are owned entirely by rich people.
Both parties spend money like water while in office, both parties promise no new taxes, both parties are entirely beholden to the lobbyists who speak on behalf of their corporate election financiers. The Democrats apologise when they cave to their vested interests and throw the occassional bone to the poor while the Republicans say it's your own fault you're poor - although how you are supposed to pull yourself up by your bootstraps if you can't afford boots they never seem to answer - and tell you the rich will save you if you'll just make them richer. Yet these are just entirely artificial flavorings, political e-numbers designed to differentiate two parties led by multi-millionaires working for the good of multi-millionaires.
Rhetorical pop quiz: name me the last President who wasn't a multi-millionaire already, or the last one who ended his term in office poorer than he began it.
Yet this is a politically leftist blog and our readership is broadly liberal in sympathies, so I expect to be told that the next election really is the "most important evah!", that a President Palin would wreck the nation beyond recovery, and so we lefties must hold our noses and vote for the lesser evil of the Democratic party because if we don't then the Republicans will surely win.
And I answer that the Republicans will indeed win if lefties and liberals and progressives don't vote Dem - but that it won't mean the end of the world, or even America - and maybe should be welcomed.
There's no doubt that another Republican administration would be painful, even more painful than another Democratic administration pursuing essentially the same economics, but we had eight years of Bush and it didn't destroy America. Obama has proven that it is perfectly possible, and apparently politically acceptable to his supporters, to keep Bush's spendthrift ways while at the same time preserving Bush's tax cuts - and it still hasn't destroyed America yet. It hasn't even convinced a near-majority to stop voting Republican for some strange reason!
But perhaps, if it is painful enough - as much as this Democratic administration and the Republican administration before it have proven painful to the working and middle classes - then it will finally help the people of America realise that continuing to expect either of two near-identical football teams to play the game very differently from how they have in the past is foolish.
Because it is only once the people realise - against the many distractions the two parties mount to disguise the fact - that they are essentially two wings of a Rich Party that there's any chance of getting truly representative parties and a return to "by the people, for the people". I'm a democratic socialist so I firmly believe that the people would naturally choose a Labor Party and that such would be good for the nation - but I'm democratic before I'm a socialist so I'm just fine with others' mileages varying on that.
Still, it's Class War people - and putting aside both parties "of the rich, For the rich" is the next great leap forwards.
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