On a rainy day

[MadHound]

The skies are grey, and the snow is being washed away by rain. A cold wind is blowing and there might be ice. A distinctly non-cheery day for my distinctly non-cheery mood.

We are faced by a set of epic problems in this country. Illegal, immoral wars are sapping our moral and draining our already parched treasury. The promise, at least for some, of the Obama presidency has turned to ash as he has turned out to be just one more corporate candidate in a long line of corporate candidates. Congress has shown that it is nothing more than the public, governmental wind of corporate America as the health care reform has become a joke, worse, a gift to the insurance industry. Education is quickly being privatized and dumbed down while our LGBT brothers and sisters are paid lip service and little more. Meanwhile our debt is crippling us, restricting what we can do to help ourselves, not that the help that is offered by the government is all that great unless you're in the financial sector.

What we're seeing now is the full emergence of the corporate state, one that exists solely for the benefit of corporations and our only role as we the people is to provide labor as cheaply as possible and to purchase goods and services at an ever increasing rate, even if we ruin ourselves financially. Democrat and Republican are really quite meaningless at this point, that dime's worth of difference has become but a couple of sense as the minority party dictates the direction of the country through sheer obstinacy and spinelessness on part of the Dems. The programs that are offered up to "help" the people are not liberal programs in any sense of the word, but rather retreaded Republican programs. The HCR reform being proposed has its ideological and structural roots in Nixon. The stimulus, with forty percent of the package taken up by tax cuts, seems more akin to Reagan era thinking that Roosevelt.

Truly liberal voices, truly liberal policies are either ignored or eliminated, consigned to howling in the wilderness as the party tacks ever rightward. If they are acknowledged at all it is in terms of either scorn or incredulity. And the energy and will of a people are either diverted by shiny objects (Tiger Woods!), or by political actions that are ultimately meaningless. That, or we're simply so used up from working two jobs, taking care of our family, and trying to live our own lives. A large grey funk, much like the rain clouds outside of window, has settled over the country as more and more people realize that the Hope and Change that they dared to believe in turns out to be more of the same ol', same ol' that we've seen for the past fifty-sixty years.

We're reaching a crisis in our country and there are really only two choices. The first choice is to institute a radical reform in our government that will give it back to the people. This reform is publicly financed election campaigns, for every office from dog catcher to president. Take corporate money out of our election process and give our government back to we the people. This is the option that we must take, otherwise we'll simply drift into the other option. That is increasing civil unrest, think Teabaggers on steroids, anarchists, anti-war, an ever increasing fragmentation of our society until it all flies apart in some great crisis, a revolution or civil war. That is where we're going, and frankly that end is within sight. Twenty, thirty years down the road America as we know it could disappear.

So we have a choice here, work for real meaningful change in the form of publicly financed election campaigns or just let it all slide towards the abyss. If we choose the former, we must be ready for the fight of our generation, because corporations and their government minions will not give up power readily. If we choose the latter, well, we'll all be in for a long, grey, rainy day.

[panader0]

1. Totally off subject

but I dig Desmond Decker. "Dem a loot dem a shot dem a wail in shantytown"

[MadHound]

2. kick n/t