Election thoughts...Bailout Truth...more...

Found this at:
TruthDig.com

“This was the largest single act of class warfare in the modern history of this country,” Rep. Dennis Kucinich, D-Ohio, who led the fight in the House against the bailout, told me by phone from Cleveland. “It is a direct attack on the American people’s ability to be able to stabilize their homes and their neighborhoods. This single vote will define the careers of everyone. We are back to taxation without representation, to markets that are openly rigged.”

“We buried the New Deal,” he said of the vote. “Instead of Democrats going back to classic New Deal economics where we prime the pump of the economy and start money circulating among the population through saving homes, creating jobs and building a new infrastructure, our leaders chose to accelerate the wealth of the nation upwards. They did so in a way that was destructive of free-market principles. They ripped away all the familiar moorings. We are in an uncharted sea where the traditional roles of the political parties are being switched. The Democrats have unfortunately become so enamored and beholden to Wall Street that we are not functioning to defend the economic interest of the broad base of the American people. It was up to the Republicans to protect not just a so-called free market but the American taxpayer and attempt to block this. This is an outrage. This was democracy’s Black Friday.”

The author, Chris Hedges, continues in his own words:
"Obama’s voting record in the Senate is in line with the corrupt Democratic mainstream, including Biden, who works on behalf of corporations and especially the credit card industry."

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People are buying the line that the Democrats are offering hope. Here's what I think leading up to the election:

If Sarah Palin being selected by McCain tells you how he works: What does the selection of Biden tell you about how Obama works?

What segment of our society has been mostly affected by Biden's War on Drugs? (Wars are really on people, right?)

What other war has Biden supported?

What corporations are behind Biden?

The oppressed once again end up supporting their corporate oppressors and think it is going to be different this time. They buy the false promises presented in ideological posturing.

(Bill Clinton brags about making more millionaires than Bush. I heard him say it at the Obama rally in Florida. This is how we should be judged?)

They've promised health care reform before. And gave up on it.

Instead of progressives being re-enfranchised, they've been convinced to compromise and move right towards the center. (I.e. give up on true health care reform.)

Political radicalism is dead in the youth.

The parties have beaten them down.

The centrists have won.

The youth now say: Better to have voted centrist and won, than to have voted for ideals and have lost. Reinforcing the binary myth of this country. Reinforcing the binary into the future, ignoring the false consciousness behind it, and the consequences into the future. Reinforcing the myth that a complex society can be represented by two options. Buying it, and allowing it to continue.

What happened to fighting with radicalism?

The radical vote has been bought by the false promises of corporate run politics in which the binary poles are each funded by the same money sources.

And *Yes*, Obama is way better than McCain, and certainly better than what we have. Yet they both cater to fear, teach you to fear the other.

Ideology, as Terry Eagleton says, is still at work in today's world. Yet we don't really address it, question it, fight its oversimplifying doctrines. We just replace it with other oversimplifying doctrines. And we've only got two to choose from.

But truly, I believe our form of (fake) capitalistic ideology (really more of a corporatocracy...I thought I made it up, but then I googled it...) has run its course. So, hey, I'll be a radical, or whatever. Expressive, and hopefully somewhat aware of my ideology, and I will keep pointing out, as I see it, the failings of the ideology of our political system, not just the ideology of each of the two parties. But the failure and inability of a corporate controlled two party system to represent a complex society.

In this small town, I'm considered an outsider for my politics.

The few almost progressive Democrats want to frame my non-Obama (non-McCain) vote as a vote for McCain.

But to frame a non-Obama vote simply as being a vote for McCain is demeaningly reductionistic...My vote is much more than that. And maybe even somewhat well researched, thought-out, and incorporates my lived-experience.