An independent voter's observation

Listening to what pundits of the American news media say about our country’s politics never ceases to puzzle me.  I come away believing that Americans appear to be incapable of thinking in any way or fashion other than in terms of absolutes – left or right, big or small, right or wrong, win or lose, all or nothing.  It seems that they want us to ignore the wide gray areas that exist in between these extremes. Or is it that they know we easily get carried away by our boundless enthusiasm in pro or against any given premise?

            I cringe when I hear some of the aspiring candidates to the 2012 Republican nomination for president disparage against the incumbent president, Barack Obama, accusing him of socialism, populism, etc.

            What a nonsense.  To label Obama's agenda as socialism for the sole reason of his espousing a social agenda that seeks to respond to the needs of all the people is to forget the very foundations of our nation.  Let’s not forget that the premises of our Constitution—where it states that “We the People of the United States…”,  or Abraham Lincoln’s most famous exhortation “…that government of the people, by the people, for the people shall not perish from the earth”—did reflect a certain collectivism. Both statements inherently promised a social agenda, certainly not socialism.

            In this year’s election, the Republicans' efforts to whitewash and return to an economic system whose reckless inequities have produced terrible suffering to our middle and working classes, and to label as socialism an agenda of providing a much needed “social contract” for all the people, is sheer stupidity.

            Having a social conscience doesn’t mean socialism. It simply means common sense. In any case, it is the government’s constitutional responsibility to protect all the people, not just some people.

Food for Thought

Remember the day, when inspired by a speech given by President Dwight Eisenhower, the media and most of us aimed our collective venom guns at what he called the Military–Industrial Complex? When the president, himself a military man, warned against the collusion of these two powerful forces in our society, a complicity that eventually resulted in the Pentagon paying zillions of dollars for a lousy toilet seat? Well, it appears that yesteryear's corruption has turned our national ethos into a gigantic hydra. It poisoned our nation to the point where nobody talks about it anymore. Where most of us pay lip service to the myriad of immoral practices this hydra has unleashed upon us, the most damaging of these being the new mega collusion we may well call the Military-Industrial-Banking–Government Complex.
We have seen this expanded complex playing out its hypocritical schemes. All the way from the time of the Reagan Administration's market economy––a practice that upended the applecart by changing the old moral–based equation of "cost plus reasonable profit" into the new immoral one of "whatever the market will bear," which opened the floodgates to irresponsible greed and price gouging––aided and abetted by our country's successive administrations' utter mismanagement of our nation's resources.
And yet, We The People, keep relatively quiet, knowingly or unknowingly accepting everything that is thrown at us by Big Business, and yes, also by a government that always seems to side up with it, rarely with the middle class, almost never with the average John Does.
But, is it possible that we are not as enlightened as we think we are?
We heard that the Big Bailout of Wall Street, the auto industry, etc.––anybody but the middle class or the regular John Doe––smacked of socialism. Since when helping the richest is socialism? It is capitalism at its devious worst.
As voters, come election time, we forget our dissatisfaction and fall for the ever–repetitious slogans and promises of the candidates, whose real interest too often is self–promotion and how best to fit into that golden cage, the military-industrial-banking–government complex.
We stand by and allow big business, with government consent, to rob us clean – first by dumping on us a recession they and they alone created, then by misleading us into accepting new laws and regulations meant to help our people, but which at the end only benefit the big guys in business.
Finally, Obama, who scared everyone out of their wits with his feared populist–socialist leanings, now appears to have fallen prey to the very same evils he so eloquently denounced when he came to us in the guise of a savior.
My friends, nothing ever changes. Contrary to the old Western movie stereotype, where the hero cowboy rids the town of the robber barons who took it over, in our real world, the greedy, government–sanctioned, robber barons always win at the end of the day.