Tonight may be the last election I witness in American history. People in this country are sick, tired, and poor. The people of this country proved to me tonight they are angry with something in government that cannot be defined by Democrat or Republican. They are angry with a broken system that has disenfranchised them.
I just witnessed national news call Idaho’s Governor race after one-hundred votes. The editors were quick to pull the number from the screen, replacing it with a checkmark graphic next to the projected winner. I saw South Carolina elect a Governor to run their state, with little over twenty-five percent of the population’s vote. My state of Ohio elected it’s Governor with around 30% of the population voting, this is a recurring theme in every state tonight.
Tonight I saw sixty congressional seats and House Majority go to the Republicans two short years after the media claimed the Republican Party died a horrible death, at the hands of a new Democratic wave led by Obama.
Two years after “change” swept the country, “change” has swept through once again.
George Bush exposed corruption in government through his incompetence. I thought to myself many times, “this guy can’t be in charge, someone else has to be making these decisions.” Because of this, I consider George W. Bush the best president of modern times because of his transparency. It didn’t show in policy, but it showed through his horribly written speeches, idiotic debates, and hesitance to respond to anything the American public told him. George W. Bush was incompetent and the worst actor in U.S. Presidential history, and because of this I beame more informed and involved in the way my country works. George Bush woke a sleeping giant with his blunders. This government has led us astray long before George W. Bush, but Bush made government corruption blatant, he brought it to the forefront of our minds.
It was clear after Iraq that Bush’s agenda was not an agenda of the people. It was obvious his agenda was not one of peace or prosperity. We destroyed a surplus and sunk our country through out of control spending led by Republicans. We went into two unjust and pre-emptive wars, incited by an isolated terror attack, and did so led by Republicans.
George Bush won his first presidency without the popular vote, and won a second term through roused patriotism found in wartime. During this time the First Amendment was weakened through the implementation of “Free Speech Zones” repressing the right of assembly. Personal freedoms were fringed upon through the “Patriot Act” as the public’s phones, computers, and privacy could be monitored by the government and police without a warrant. During this time “Habeas Corpus” was damaged by the exposing of water-boarding by the CIA and military.
Dress the facts up in any garb of nationalism you want, but our nation became one of pre-emptive war, where torture tactics became Standard Operating Procedure, and many people around the world were detained, and in some cases executed without any due process of law. We witnessed gay citizens denied their right to happiness and marriage because of religious beliefs that defined marriage, in a country where our forefathers stated a forced separation of church and state.
President George W. Bush’s approval average was forty-nine percent, the highest approval average of any president monitored was John F. Kennedy at seventy percent, who was assassinated. The highest approval point of Kennedy was 83%, Bush’s highest was 90% after the terrorist attacks of 9/11, pushing him into a second term. There is a large shroud of doubt surrounding Kennedy’s assassination, as well as there is surrounding the attacks of 9/11 and the “War on Terror”. Both times the term “conspiracy theory” is tossed around loosely at those who have legitimate questions about details, I believe politicians and “powers that be” change policy and focus on approval ratings more than the people do.
President Obama came into an America angered by politics, after being led by leaders into two blundered wars. John McCain held a lot of support as a moderate Republican who opposed Bush in many of his policies, he touted a respectable service record both in the military and in his public service. According to polls McCain and Obama were very close, until McCain chose the globally ignorant and unseasoned Sarah Palin as his running mate. I thought to myself, “there is no way he is making these campaign decisions" A feeling similar to the feelings I held of the Bush administration. McCain later confirmed Palin was not his decision, and neither were the uncharacteristically brutal and right-wing tactics of his campaign. The man running for president was told what to do by someone else, and it wrecked his campaign.
Obama won the presidency on campaign promises of “change”, the ending of Bush’s wars and the repealing of his policies. Patriot Act and Free Speech Zones were never touched. Troops pulled offensive operations from Iraq but still thousands of troops are in Iraq monitoring the country. The War in Afghanistan has escalated along with drone attacks inside Pakistan borders. Before Bush left office he pushed through a one-hundred and seventy billion dollar stimulus and the printing of more money which pushed inflation of U.S. currency. Obama’s bailout is said to possibly cost upward of three trillion dollars by it’s end. The bailout ensured the upholding of debts held by citizens after the banks proceeded with predatory lending and increases in interest rates of loans. Many have realized foreign policy and domestic policy lacks major change since Obama’s election. It almost seems as if once elected, someone else dictated to Obama what to do My guess is that before he ever sat in the oval office, a large stack of classified briefing papers waited on his desk. The same papers that await every U.S. president. I don’t know what they are or what they say, and that is why I don’t visually age a decade in less than four years.
Many believed if Obama was not elected and failed Bush policies continued under a Republican leader, that Liberals would revolt, weary of the election process and it’s fairness, the effectiveness of ballot counting machines, and the continuation of unpopular American policies.
In a short time President Obama dropped from the public’s choice for change to a forty-seven percent approval rating. Talks of tax increases on a strangling public proved to be the final straw, as Republicans won back a majority after all the damage the party and Bush caused. National unemployment is the highest since The Great Depression. After the housing bubble burst, people are not only losing their jobs, but they are losing their homes, all because of contracts being held over their heads by the very banks their tax-dollars helped bail out. The Democrats botched their chance to fix what ails the country. I wouldn’t expect anything else, as my time in politics has only taught me someone is always on a phone pulling strings, regardless of what party or how powerful the person.
Over the past thirty years we have watched our economic powerhouse collapse. While we continue to drive inflation, print money, and bail out predatory lenders, our factories and unionized jobs have been shipped overseas to underpaid serfs without unionization in countries that take advantage of unfair trade practices. Corporations in our country have effectively bankrupted our people and dissolved their livlihoods while simultaneously enslaving working populations of third world countries globally. Most goods purchased are not manufactured in America, and all goods only cost the producer a miniscule fraction of what they cost the customer. Our once proud economy has become a glorified pyramid scheme, where people like Bernie Madoff are simply a product of their environment. Cheap products sold by untrustworthy men, created to break so they are bought once again. Money decides our careers, our decisions, often our relationships, it also dictates American politics, and has done so well before George Bush took office.
I reflect on this all tonight after rich Republicans take power from rich Democrats in the legislature. The legislature has routinely failed the country and working-class for well over a decade, regardless of which party controlled the Presidency, Congress, or Senate. I look at a public, where the majority does not even take to the ballot. The voting population and minority swings itself on political talking points, repeated through the media and political commercials purchased by the rich politicians and parties.
During 2008 all I heard in any Democratic commercials was the word “change”, in 2010 all I have heard from Republicans was the word “spending”. Once again I did not hear one detailed plan of how anything will happen, why it will happen or when. I did not see one debate where two educated people identified problems and gave specifics to how they would solve them. I saw politics as usual, we turn one way to be let down, then turn the other way in desperation only to again be let down. We will see this trend again only a few short months into this Republican House majority. This is how an oligarchy that is out of touch with the public operates. It takes and absorbs without intentions of ever giving back.
In 2012 the voting minority will either be so tired of the Republican House that they will narrowly vote Obama in for a second term, or they will be so tired of Obama that he will lose the presidency to whatever choice the Republican Party brings forth. If Obama wins, the country will be even further divided and agitated by the end of his presidency. If the Republican Party wins the Presidency and holds on to a majority of the House the inevitable will happen, political chaos. I can’t claim to know when this will happen but I strongly believe it will happen in the next five years. This political unrest has already begun in countries all over the world such as Greece, and I believe the unrest will spread as does the failure of a global economy created and run by corporate leaders and politicians who can never gain enough money or power to satisfy their greed.
Most of the population recognizes early on they will never be President, but now a majority realizes they will never live as citizens respected by their elected officials in the nation their forefathers built. They have long been disenfranchised by two parties controlled by corporate donation money, but now people are losing their homes and their jobs. If these financial trends continue at the pace they have, and the political landscape does not change drastically in the next four years, there will be a revolt.
I fail to say revolution because I believe that would signify a unified and popular mass looking for major reforms to government and policy. I believe we will have a dumbed down and angry mob mentality sweeping the country that has been fueled by government and politics that has mutilated unity in this country through divide and conquer politics. The left and right are angry with government, but also hold a deep hatred for one another, orchestrated by divisive leaders who are not in touch with the American people and the social issues they want resolved. It is just a matter of time before the anger boils over against one another, or the public becomes angry at the same government at the same time.
Most people don’t want this to happen, I am one of those people. But then again, most people don’t vote, they don’t go to rally’s, they don’t scream and demean those with opposing political views. Most people in this country are tolerant of different races, religions, and personal choices, because they have more important things to do than point out others in hatred. The majority is controlled by the minority in elections, a one percent minority controls ninety-nine percent of the country’s wealth. Instead of pulling together for real change and solutions we eat each other while the elite sit back and watch, so high on the pyramid that it doesn’t matter who we elect in this country. They are global, powerful, and out of our political reach.
Tonight I look at a mess created by corrupt politicians on both sides who carelessly affect our everyday lives, running rampant with our finances, destroying our values as a nation. The government decides who can be married, the government OK’d domestic spying, the government OK’d pre-emptive wars and developed imperialism in a country built upon non-interventionist beliefs, the government printed tax dollars to hold its public in debt while destroying the value of the dollar, the government tells the people where to pray and where to protest while the media tells them what to think. After public is told what to think they vote, only to regret their vote once again a few short months.
Tonight I reflect on a broken system and the last peaceful American election I may witness. By 2012 I think the country will either be on the edge of increasing violence, or it will be recognized the election process is so corrupt and broken that I, along with a majority will fail to recognize it as an election at all. While I hope political violence does not spread across the country, I believe it is inevitable. I don’t believe this country will ever be the same again after tonight, I believe anger will hit levels never seen before in my times. It only takes thirty percent to control the other seventy, and it takes way less to cause disturbances or growing violence. Either the people will turn on each other, or the people will turn on their government, at which time the government will strike back hard and repressively. I believed this unrest would be subsided by Obama’s election. After Obama has gone into the midterm elections with such a low approval rating, I believe it’s only a matter of time before things erupt if the economy does not mend.
History has shown lethargy and gridlock in policy when a President’s party is opposite of the legislature’s policy. Based on this, the most hopeful we can be for the future is that things will stay exactly as they are, and I don’t believe most people find that status quo acceptable.
In that time I will keep my beliefs and hope for a better future.
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