Republicans took charge of Congress near the end of Clinton’s last term and did not give it up until near the end of Bush II’s term. Before that Congress was mostly controlled by Democrats, with few exceptions, since World War II. The presidency has vacillated back and forth between parties in that time with slightly more Republicans serving than Democrats.

Recent American politics have been marked by ever more partisan bickering. The two major parties appear to be as far apart philosophically as they could possibly be but in the important area of efficacy they are very similar. Both parties seem to be equally bad at winning and keeping the hearts and minds of the electorate. In 2006 voters began rejecting Republican governance and in 2008 gave the Democrats their strongest majorities in 15 years. Now in 2010 voters appear poised to return titular control of Congress to Republicans. Is the public simply fickle or has there been a significant swing in the mood of America?

What is really happening is that the American public has grown weary of things going poorly, economically and policy wise both foreign and domestic. They have less and less patience with whatever party is in power and consistently give Congress it’s lowest approval ratings ever. They are quick to give the party in power the hook.

The basic reason for this is that although the parties appear to be largely polarized they have both lost touch with the common man in America and have both sold out to different factions of the same corporate overlords. The American public is not dumb. They know we are being played but their traditional means of rectifying the problem, the vote, no longer gets them anywhere. Republicans ruin the economy. Democrats ruin the economy. Republicans laugh right in the face of the public. Democrats give face time to the people but are laughing behind their backs.

There is good reason Americans are angry. No one, it appears, is listening to them. Both sides of the coin of governance mock them. The polarization among the voters informs who they think is to blame for this travesty. The reality is that vast amounts of time, energy and money are being used to keep folks at each others throats. This is because if they ever found out just who really was to blame and united against them then lots of wealthy people would stand to have their cash cows slaughtered and the hold corporations have over us would be weakened mightily.

Yes, it is the multinational corporations who run the show. Both parties kowtow to them. If the angry conservatives and the frustrated progressives ever realize they both have the same enemy and unite in defeating it we might just have a chance to restore a semblance of a Democratic Republic to our country and survive deep into the 21st Century. We don’t have much time to effectuate the real change needed to give us a fighting chance.

I’m not holding my breath.

After my heart attack I simply stayed away from any sort of entry into my blog, save the last. I’m not sure why I shied away. Maybe it was a feeling that my words weren’t being heard. Maybe it was a feeling my words weren’t worth being heard. I don’t really know.

In the last month I have tried to access the site that has hosted this blog for the last 4 years but I could not enter new posts. Therefore I have moved the blog to this site. Perhaps a change of scenery will inspire me to write more and more often. I still feel I have something worthwhile to say. In the face of constant bleating from the right over this, that and everything maybe it is more important than ever that progressive voices speak up and and try to be heard. To that end I will do a bit of promotion for the blog and see if I can attract a few more readers. It is, I think, appropriate, seeing that the blog has moved, to let people know about the move. Lots of folks don’t even know it exists. So there is an “If a tree falls in the forest” thing going on that for the sake of progressive dialog should be overcome, if possible.

I have archived all the posts from the other blog site. They appear under posts from August 20, 2010 if you care to access them. I surprise myself sometimes when I go back and read them again. How did I come up with that stuff? I am thankful for the gifts I have been given and I feel I must continue to work to share them with those who could use them.

Enjoy !!!

Yes, it has been awhile since I graced these pages with my turgid prose. Part of the reason was not having anything earth shattering to say for some time and a large portion of the reason was my nearly big one heart attack of November 2009. Five stents in two arteries later, plus a new diet and not enough exercise to satisfy my doctors I am still not back to normal normal but am close enough to feel like I have a satisfactory life once again. Like most of us who suffer from heart disease I neglected to take seriously the warning signs until I was nearly dead. Thankfully my local hospital has an excellent cardiac unit and some top rated cardiologists. I received the best care and consider myself an exceedingly lucky man.

Almost dying gives one an unusually acute sense of their own mortality. You notice all of the silly and detrimental things you have done by habit all your life and reassess your uncanny ability to undermine your good health. This ability extends out into our society in many ways. For example it is nearly impossible to dine in any restaurant without having to order food which comes nowhere close to meeting the terms of one’s heart healthy diet. This is especially true for fast food. If I ate one of KFC’s new double down chicken sandwiches without the bun I would be consuming over two days worth of saturated fats. One can of Progresso soup has nearly an entire days worth of sodium. My rant about American food, its production and distribution is for another blog entry but suffice it to say that as Americans we have been given what we crave for a price that is often under the cost of production. Humans crave three tastes, salt, fat and sugar. These items exist in rare quantities in nature but largely because of government subsidies and sophisticated food processing they are made readily available to us in large quantities, easily accessible and inexpensive.

Every day I see people eagerly wolfing down foods that cannot be healthy for their hearts. No wonder heart attack and stroke are major killers of Americans. But the huge corporate food, or as I prefer to call it, edible food like substance, industry just gets us more and more hooked on the worst kinds of stuff. All to make a buck.

Scandalous.

Lots of talk is swirling around health care reform. Everyone seems to have an opinion and those with the means to promote theirs are now actively seeking to persuade and influence the public, many of whom do not fully understand just how our health care system works. People with a vested interest in maintaining insurance industry profits deride the single payer option as government control over health care. They say the government will come between you and your doctor in the sensitive area of determining what care is needed. They say there will be rationing and waiting lines. This is clearly the pot calling the kettle black. We already have non-medical personnel in the form of insurance actuaries determining what procedures can be done and we already have rationed care from insurance companies in the form of rejections due to preexisting conditions and from managed care conglomerates choosing which doctors we can see. We already have long waiting lines for specialized care in America. What single payer does not have is almost 30% administrative costs.

Single payer, simply told, is merely a different way to finance health care. If you were to finance a car and were told you had two choices, one in which 25% of your payment went to administrative costs and one in which 3 % went to those same costs which would you choose. I believe any sane person would choose the plan where more of his payment went to actually paying off the principle and interest. As long as the powerful interests of the insurance industry, big Pharma and managed care companies can hoodwink us into continuing to justify people making profit from financing and providing health care then we will get a broken system. Does the fire department make a profit? Do we not pay for fire protection, hoping we will never use it, but feeling good when our neighbor does, regardless of their economic status? What is the difference between fire protection and health care? Simply put, we have come to see fire protection as a right of all citizens. We have yet to see health care in the same light, largely because it has traditionally been a privileged commodity, subject to the profit driven market, which the wealthy can afford and the poor cannot.

People would be outraged if their neighbor’s home was allowed to burn because they could not afford fire protection insurance. Until we see health care as one of our inalienable rights we will not be able to reform it to the degree that it will cease becoming a greater and greater economic burden. Ask why we are the only major nation in the world without a national health plan and we only need look as far as the continued greed of the insurance industry. If we continue to allow the profiteers to define the health care debate I am afraid we will never get the kind of health care reform we deserve.

Makes for a very sick nation.

The American Dream used to involve hard work as a function of reaping the benefits of a vibrant economy. Even in today’s tenuous economy if one sows their seed in good earth and tends to it lovingly one should expect a life giving harvest. It has always been posited that if one works hard and plays by the rules ( The quintessential American state of being) they would be assured of partaking in the fruits of the alleged “Greatest nation on earth”.

This axiom is assumed by many as the recipe for success in America. At least it is sold as such to the aspiring underclass. Work hard, abide by the rules and you too can climb the ladder high enough to perhaps grab some low hanging fruit, something to make life a little sweeter, regardless of your last name or the number of acronyms behind it.

There exists, though, a class of people for whom this time honored method of achieving the American Dream is not good enough. It is beneath them to actually work for anything, having been raised in an entitlement society. This is not the entitlement of the poor to wealth without work as is complained about by so many conservative pundits but rather the entitlement of birth. These people feel entitled to the fruits of the dream simply because they exist. What is really worth something to them is to manifest wealth without working at all. This is what they expect from life and this is their goal. They have been born into wealth and they have been taught from an early age, through example, that making lots of money without working is an honorable and admirable goal. Something for nothing is the only acceptable result of waking up each day for these seemingly ‘tortured’ souls.

These are the ones who look for insider trading deals on Wall Street, who look to use social networking to arrange sweetheart business deals and use the accident of their monied birth to exclude those who can’t get a good tee time from ever having the advantages they enjoy.

When we look at why the American Dream is fading away, before our very eyes, look not to those who still believe in hard work, but have no access to the good earth on which to sow their seed, to assign your blame. Look rather to those with rich, dark earth in abundance that they are all too eager to sell to the highest bidder, never having ever so much as run their hands through it, to understand its real value or appreciate the very fact that they are so lucky as to even imagine it running under their feet.

Making a living without working is a necessary, temporary social safety net for some people. Is there fraud? Certainly there is. But the greater fraud is the wealthy seeking to make a killing without lifting a finger. As long as our goal is to get rich without having to work some may gain momentary riches as individuals but as a whole society our seed will fall on the hard rocks and suffer.