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A Public Service Announcement to the LeftFeb 24 '11 Write an essay on this topic.
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The Bottom Line Obama's Change is about as realized as Bush's Freedom.
The Reality of Regulation It should be clear to all but the most blindly loyal Democrats that the party claiming the "liberal" moniker in our society has used a perverted, self-serving interpretation of leftist view to betray every concept the "compassionate" and "merciful" side of the spectrum typically touts. Most obvious of these abuses was the TARP funds, whose greatest impact thus far seems to have been stuffing the pockets of the S&P 500 executives at the expense of the hundreds of millions of Americans uninvolved in the outsourcing or hollow loan practices that prompted the collapse. And in this now predictable cycle of regulation reform and subsidized industry enacted laughably in the name of "Change", even the hard-left should be wondering: 'If the will of a politician is seldom free of the corporate forces that financed his/her administration, how is any attempt at regulation not immediately compromised by the profit interests of the Party's business allies?' One could deny my definition of a politician's will as cynical. I will not deny that some scant few rational idealists stand against the trend of sloth, corporate despotism and blatant ignorance embedded within our contemporary political arena, but they are too few to be a force. One could argue that no business has anything to gain from ANY regulation. Perhaps it's presumptuous of me, but it seems the biggest of businesses have much to gain from having up-and-coming small businesses struggle beneath the high taxes that their subsidiary-supplemented profits can soak, especially given the bailouts it makes possible to them. Other recent forms of "regulation" seem contrived and fouled up by private profiteering, like the semantics of Obama's healthcare reform. Outside of adding more weight to the financial obligations of business owners and providing more money for public health, it seems to be nothing more than the largest of private health insurers flexing their political wings: 'Buy our policies, however inflated the premiums or castrated the coverage, or we'll get the government to charge you.' I suppose a better question, when confronted with a growing history of counter-intuitive regulation (no, it's not always a redundancy), a better question to poise is: 'When was the last time regulation hasn't been used to unfairly prop some businesses up at the expense of others, or just to the expense all? False Liberalism This is the question I have been asking myself constantly since the liberals swept the White House in '08. The answers change from time to time, but they all hover around the same conclusion - while progressives will continue to inch forward in the domains of subcultural equality and environmental policy, the liberal ideal of using government regulation and progressive programs to bring balance to the nearly malignant inequities natural to deregulated Capitalism. . . is a fools dream. America, above all else, is a land of merchants and business interest. Our government will never again act legitimately for the will of the non-business owning, consuming majority, so long as billionaire private-sector multinationals posing as patriots own the hearts, the minds, and more importantly, the wallets of our leaders. Changing that reality is beyond the power of any American political party. Fierce business loyalty, for better or for worse, is just American nature. So where does that leave liberals? Where does that leave those of us who see the source of government oppression and ineptitude as the multilateral corporations behind both parties? Some will continue to cherry-pick the occasional Democrat who seems to fight for the low and middle classes. I feel such fool-hearty leaps of faith almost invariably end with the usual slew of broken Democratic promises, and private or public profiteering from rigged regulatory practices. Others will recant Capitalism all together and drink the Communist's brew, though such a discourse will invariably lead to even more hopeless conclusions with impractical resolutions. Others may even switch sides, finally swallowing the many social fallacies and economic impossibilities of the American Dream, or learning to glorify the minority lifestyle of entrepreneurial success, embracing the business class the majority places all of it's faith in. Obviously, for the rest who claim the liberal mantle, who remain aware of the poorly justified sense of entitlement feeding the corporate greed that seeds regressive taxation, displaces our crippling deficit on the working class, and accelerates outsourcing, none of the above options will be acceptable. In what way can a believer in a government to counter-weight the self-serving plutocratic nepotism of the private executive elite find hope in a society supersaturated in pro-vane philosophies, concentrated anti-intellectualism and a federal government whose services are bought and sold every four years to the highest private bidder? Far From the Final Solution Be critical of your own ideals. Remember how much our nation suffered because, save for a few Republicans, Bush's betrayal of the conservatives' small government ideals went completely unquestioned? Remember how silent those now championing Tea Party politics were when our government was spending very liberally on the wealthy, to none of the gain such a philosophy typically espouses? This is because, when one side's leaders have power, their respective followers sit on their hands and tend to assume all is well. This was certainly the case under Bush, when Republicans the country over failed to see the harm in spending more than what the "socialist" Obama spent on social initiatives, on expensive, wasteful, counter-intuitive wars. This wasn't the case when the Republicans, in all of their "fiscal responsibility", saw wisdom in wasting almost as much on tax-breaks for the richest of the rich (around 900 billion), than the liberals spent on bailing those very same bastards out. And now, under Obama, the same transfixations are all still true. For all of the left's talk of peace, we've seen mostly escalation of the War on Terror from progressive leaders (on top of them reinstating many components of the Patriot Act). For all of the left's talk of "giving the exploited, smaller guys a chance" all they've done with their new taxes and regulations has given it mostly to all the same malefactors and self-serving businessman that the Republicans keep giving ineffective tax breaks too (and now the Democrats). I can't speak for any other liberal, but I for one am beyond furious with the Democrats. This kind of spending on the most privileged and powerful upper class in the world, be it from bailouts or tax-breaks, is something I'd expect from the Republicans - minus a bailout, it's in part what their party believes cures our economic aisles. But when Obama spends liberally, while returning to regressive, upper-class tax breaks, I fail to see much of a difference between Obama and Bush, other than personality. That, and I suppose Obama at times shifts the olive branch of federal privileges to a different slew of special, wealthy interests benefiting from displaced tax burden and government subsidiaries. The More Things Change. . . Make no mistake about my intentions here - I want the left to wake up. Obama and the contemporary crop of Democrats have shown both the bankers and business elite that benefited from the economic exploitation possible through deregulation, that when domestic markets made destitute from the profits of the advantaged few fail for their very deeds, they can fall back on the Democrats to rob the already robbed. Then thereafter, once the populace concludes regulations and intervention a bust (although no REAL regulation has been attempted), the same billionaire slew will be back at it, using the loopholes of deregulation to attain even more economic power over what can, at this point, only be called a puppet government. And that's the bottom line, liberals. Our government is not a government. It is a business offering it's ability to use military and police force to the wealthiest private players, who then buy policymakers to restructure the economy to their whims. In a more realistically liberal society of mixed economies, essential public institutions (i.e., social health, social education) often possess the most money within their respective economic domains, and thus this fear of corruption by cash offered from a private sector self-surviving in it's survivalist nature, cannot exist (excluding those admittedly many instances in which foreign capitalists use their private wealth to exploit the smaller economies of socialist democracies). Yes, you most certainly then need to deal with the problem of diminished competition, and a decline in innovation - problems that can be a death knell in their own right. However, when guided by some semblance of fiscally conservative spending, sensible grants and subsidiaries can have great impact at developing those areas of society that the people wish to see facilitated, without having to sell their future dreams away in debt to private benefactors so wealthy that they can control the agenda of the federal government to their whims. And if between 600 billion and a 1 trillion dollars a year isn't tied up in military spending to protect those whims abroad, or if heavy-handed stimulus packages don't flood our internationally connected markets with increasingly useless cash, it's amazing to think what might be possible in a democratic society that respects the reality of the Laffer curve, keeping it's revenue focused on social health, education and minimal unemployment. At this point, it's clear the Democratic Party will only pretend to make notions at those kinds of reforms. The Republidemotarian Party Every political discourse in America, from Democrat, to Republican, to Libertarian, remains fixed towards the same fate. You go left, you give one of the most powerful, corrupt and corporate controlled governments the world knows today more power to exploit through the guise of "ideologically justified" regulation and taxation. You go right, you give those very same corrupt elitist the cash they need to tighten their grip over government, leading to the above mentioned abuses. You take the libertarian approach, you unknowingly hand absolute power over to the private multinationalist attitude that outsourced Middle-Class America for the profits of the most exalted few, and that used government and a uncritical majority to wage pointless and expensive warfare for private profit. Every which way, an international bank or corporate agenda stands to intercept and compromise any public initiative with self-serving nuances. The result: Obama's Change is about as realized as Bush's Freedom. Liberals, I fear our party is gray and dead, owned completely by the same criminal interests we like to think were ousted with the Bush Administration. Henceforth, democracy is no longer an effective method of change in America. Political discourse itself is no longer an effective method of change in America. Both of these two interconnected concepts are reactionary to the social forces that surround them, but are inadequate on their own in bringing about any real change or freedom. Thus, if the populace of a castrated democracy desires to command their life and their freedom once more, they must seek to change mass opinion through their actions - not through the bloody purposelessness of a violent revolution, but through demonstrations of literature, cinema, art and music, through pacifistic disobedience, through rigorous academic debate, and through legal action. These actions must be coordinated in their message, enough to counter the highly effective corporate media machine that has numbed the wits of most Americans. They must convey the frustration of the betrayed grassroots, and they must convey the very real rage of the impoverished American majority. Above all else, these actions must show that the Democratic Party's "reality show" liberalism will no longer be tolerated as an effective counter force to the interests of the multinational businessman. Until then, the Democratic call for "change" will continue to seem as insincere and hypocritical as that of the Tea Party.  |
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