Sunday, January 17, 2010

Disheartened and Tired

Remember this post? Well, all I can say is that I'm deeply disappointed. I can't say things would have gone any better with Hillary as my choice, and I'm pretty sure they've gone better than they would have gone if McCain/Palin had won. But nothing, absolutely nothing, that I was hoping for has come anywhere close to fruition. The biggest and most sickening FAIL has been "healthcare reform", which as far as I can tell is only going to force people to buy insurance from the same corporations that have so very thoroughly screwed us on healthcare for generations.
And as for the TARP, well. It was better than another Great Depression, but then again we aren't even close to being out of the woods on that one, yet. Plus, I don't believe any corporate entity is "too big to fail". I'm of the "if it's too big to fail, it's too big to exist" school. So far as I can tell, what we've done is to give the biggest banks and financial players a huge interest-free loan which they then turned around and made huge amounts of money on, and then paid themselves MORE huge bonuses, while not stopping their aggregious behavior.
And while I understand that unemployment woes are more the fault of the last decade than the last year, I also believed myself to voting for a lot more intervention in the form of public works programs and green programs instead of saving AIG and Goldman-Sachs.

In short, I feel that I've been used. I feel that what the working class (aka "middle class") wants is unimportant to the Democratic Party, but what the corporations want is vitally important to them. I don't believe that a handful of Democratic Party US Senators and Lieberman are holding us all hostage for the sake of the people who voted for them. I think they're doing it for the sake of the insurance industry, and somewhat for their own egos. Even if they WERE doing it for the people in their home states, that would be unacceptable, since the total population of Nebraska is probably less than the city of San Francisco, but be that as it may our Constitution having given equal power to all US Senators there isn't much we can do about it. As does everything else that humans are involved in, the original goal for this has been twisted beyond the doubtless noble goal that allowing it was meant to serve. I expected a fight on healthcare. Instead, the Left signalled from the very beginning that they would accept compromise, and that guaranteed that they would get NOTHING. Hell, the filabuster is just a convention, not a law. They could have gone around the Blue Dogs with Reconciliation. And Lieberman? We all knew he didn't deserve to keep his Chairmanship, but remember how we had to let him keep it because otherwise he'd not vote for healthcare reform? That really worked out well for the Democrats, didn't it?

When the pundits and talking heads mention Democratic Party apathy, I could be their poster child, except I'm not a registered Democrat. Haven't been for years. I quit the party when they couldn't find their spine in 2004. I'm not seeing any evidence that they have found it even now that they hold Congress and the Presidency.

I don't agree with the Tea Party movement's rhetoric. I don't even think it's an actual grassroots movement. But I will give them this: they have scared the bejesus out of the Republican Party.

There needs to be something similar happening on the Left.