Does anyone besides me see the connection between what's gong on in Northern Africa and the Middle East to what's firmly in place here in the good old USA? Over there people are awakening to the long-term abuse they have suffered under dictators and their armies. The result is called "revolution," a term long ago associated with the founding of our own country.
Today, we in America live under a similar equation where a small cartel of corporate and governmental elites are seamlessly mutating free enterprise into a brand of capitalism that borders on fascism.
There used to be a level playing field. On one side of the gridiron was management and their representatives, the Republican party. On the other side was Labor and the Democratic party. They engaged in an antiquity called collective bargaining. And since neither side was happy with the outcome of their arbitration, what they came up with was probably a pretty fair deal. That was when free enterprise existed and flourished.
Contrast that with today where a war is being waged against collective bargaining and the Middle Class. The right-wing rulers of America, the corporations, the big banks and their paid-for politicos, want it their way 100 per cent. No more push back. Their ruthless goal is a perfect game: no runs, no hits, no errors.
In a country where people actually still believe what the government tells them and do as they are told, thank God for Madison, Wisconsin, that last bastion of Liberalism, where, like their brethren in the desert, they are willing to put it on the line for what they believe lest it be taken from them forever.
Question: where is Obama on this crucial issue? As a candidate he said repeatedly, " I promise to be walking the picket lines as President of the United States any time the workers' rights to organize are threatened." Not only hasn't he been sighted in the Badger State, but he has not even uttered a verbal sound on the subject.
Unlike the brave people in the Middle East and in Madison, Wisconsin, centrists stand for nothing. Instead, they stay right down the middle in preparation for November, 2012. Pragmatic presidents rarely show the leadership for which they were elected.
February 26, 2011