Where Have All the Democrats Gone?

Where Have All the Democrats Gone?
By David Glenn Cox



If you live long enough you will see just about all that there is to see, except maybe the Chicago Cubs win the World Series. I was reading news stories and that's how I felt when I ran across this one:

“June 12 (Bloomberg) -- U.S. lawmakers are set to approve a $106 billion war-spending bill after President Barack Obama said he would use 'every legal and administrative remedy available' to block the release of photos of troops abusing detainees.

Negotiators from the House and Senate yesterday agreed on the compromise legislation after Obama intervened in a dispute over a Republican-backed proposal to add provisions to the bill to bar release of the photos. He wrote a letter, read aloud to negotiators considering the war bill, promising to make every effort to thwart an American Civil Liberties Union lawsuit seeking to force the release of the pictures.”

Only the names have been changed to defend to guilty; we keep running around the mulberry bush and nothing changes. Our new President wants more money for wars of conquest while promising to defend the Pentagon from the American people by hiding evidence of war crimes from them. All is still the same, yet this one calls himself a Democrat.

The Republicans and Joe Lieberman, whatever he is, have proposed making the photos exempt from the Freedom of Information Act. Not since Orwell penned, “some animals are more equal than others” has there been such a display of blatant hypocrisy. Those pictures belong to us! We paid for them! They are ours! Trying to pass an amendment exempting them from the law is just another example of a government in a vacuum.

The Constitution, right and wrong, fair play and justice have become nothing more than sock puppet theatre. The Employee Free Choice Act is dead, killed not by Republicans but by Democrats. Arkansas Democratic Senator Blanch Lincoln announced that she had changed her position and now sided with the US Chamber of Commerce. Likewise Senator Ben Nelson of Nebraska and without a full complement of Democrats on board the bill is dead. Without help from the White House the bill is dead, and so while the White House will intervene on your behalf to fight the ACLU it will not intervene to support American workers, and so the bill is dead.

Several weeks ago Nancy Pelosi found herself in hot water by saying the CIA lied to her in briefings regarding enhanced interrogation (torture). The Speaker of the United States House of Representatives then began back peddling and making excuses. Did they lie to you or not? Pelosi has since dropped from the radar, aware I’m sure that those who say bad things about the CIA suddenly become accident-prone, and just as suddenly files and information begin to leak out. “Oh, I get it,” I hear you saying, “he's a conspiracy theorist!”

No, I’m a realist. The concept of no man is above the law in the United States is as dead as religious freedom in Nazi Germany. The executive branch is above the law, and the intelligence branch is above the law per our new President, the Democrat. Without legal constraints upon them what is left of democracy but to don the purple and put on circuses for the people?

In 1948 Harry S. Truman advocated and brought forth legislation for single payer health care for the American people. In 2009 Democratic Senator Max Bauchus had single payer advocates removed by force from the Senate Chamber.

In 1964 President Johnson proposed a war on poverty; in 2009 poverty is the winner.

In 1961 President Kennedy proposed putting men on the moon, the greatest industrial and technological challenge of all time. In 2009 the President wants more money to keep men in other countries, without goals, without conditions and without end. Now 240,000 contractors labor in Iraq and Afghanistan to supply a 30-million-dollar dining hall that’s never been used and a US Forces headquarters building that is so full of structural cracks, leaking pipes and sinking pavement that it is questionable if it can ever be used.

All told, 32 billion dollars have been paid to Kellogg Brown & Root alone since 2001, and how many employees would you suspect oversee those billions of dollars and thousands of contracts in both Iraq and Afghanistan? Thirteen. The government has no central record of who the contractors are or what they do nor how much they are to be paid. Try that line on the IRS sometime, “I don’t know, I didn’t keep a record of that.”

In 1941 the Democratically controlled Senate created the Truman Committee to investigate fraud and abuse under a Democratic President. The Truman Committee was estimated to have saved $11 billion dollars during the course of the war. The Democrats have controlled the House and Senate for more than two years now; where is our Truman Committee?

In response to the stock market crash in 1929, the Hoover administration proposed low interest loans to banks and industries. Through the Reconstruction Finance Corporation it lent out almost 2 billion dollars. But In 1932 Franklin Roosevelt was elected President, and the Reconstruction Finance Corporations budget was cut to 350 million dollars in 1934. Instead the money was used to aid the people, not the banks and corporations.

In 100 days Roosevelt's new administration passed fifteen individual pieces of legislation. Congress authorized the creation of the Agricultural Adjustment Administration, the Civilian Conservation Corps, the Farm Credit Administration, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, the Federal Emergency Relief Administration, the National Recovery Administration, the Public Works Administration and the Tennessee Valley Authority. Also the Emergency Banking Bill, the Glass-Steagall Act of 1933, the Farm Credit Act, the National Industrial Recovery Act and the Truth-in-Securities Act.

“Practices of the unscrupulous money changers stand indicted in the court of public opinion, rejected by the hearts and minds of men. True they have tried, but their efforts have been cast in the pattern of an outworn tradition. Faced by failure of credit they have proposed only the lending of more money. Stripped of the lure of profit by which to induce our people to follow their false leadership, they have resorted to exhortations, pleading tearfully for restored confidence. They know only the rules of a generation of self-seekers. They have no vision, and when there is no vision the people perish.” (Franklin Delano Roosevelt)

Where is our vision? Show us the way home. As millions lose their homes and major cities are laying off even police and firemen, where is our vision? The actual unemployment rate is approaching 20%. American families have lost a third of their net wealth since 2007. Tent cities are appearing across the country and still there is no nationwide plan to do anything to help the American worker. We have bailout plans for the big banks and insurance companies and Chrysler and GM and those plans all have one thing in common. Cut costs by eliminating workers, and in the case of GM the President says, “We will not try to micro manage, will not tell them where or when to open factories.”

These are our nation's leaders, a Democratic president fighting with the ACLU to keep from you what rightfully belongs to you and the Republicans always trying to pass yet another law to exempt the government from following the law. They are a whipsaw that only takes us deeper and further from the rightful purpose of government.

“The law was made for one thing alone, for the exploitation of those who don't understand it, or are prevented by naked misery from obeying it.”
(Bertolt Brecht)

Where is our vision?
Where are our Democrats?

That should tell you something.

Do you really expect your elected officials to be better than you are? With any better morality or honor or honesty?

If you do this to your leaders...


...why should they feel any loyalty to you?

what he thinks he can get through the mostly corporate-owned congress?

They wanted someone to take care of business so they wouldn't have to. They didn't want regular, permanent involvement in politics or public affairs, so they hired Obama to do it for them.

"Now Obama is elected and he'll do all the stuff I wanted to do, but didn't want to do myself." It's tempting to say "I hired the black guy to clean up after the world's mess so I won't have to get my hands dirty." But I don't want to accuse people of that kind of racism. I only want to accuse them of being lazy yuppies who don't really care.

Welcome to the club, Earth Bound Misfit. It's nice to trust someone else to fix your life and your nation's problems, instead of getting involved, isn't it? Kind of like trusting...oh, I don't know...Dubya?

How were you able to discern my level of "involvement", based on ONE comment on an anonymous discussion board in which I criticized the RIDICULOUS conclusions you posted in reply #11.

It would be nice - and an exhibition of confidence in the position you take - if you would refrain from questioning the level of "involvement" and "responsibility" of persons with whom you have not met nor even engaged in any previous discussion with over what are differences of opinion. I know it's popular these days to label those DUer's with whom we disagree "cowards", "cheerleaders", "backstabbers" etc, but it's really not conducive to good public debate.

I retract what I originally posted re: your reply #11. It's not "the dumbest fucking thing I've ever read", it's the 2nd dumbest.

Your follow-up comment now being the DUMBEST.

Speaking of dumb comments---"Kind of like trusting...oh, I don't know...Dubya?"

:eyes:

If we can't get real change now, then it's time to throw the bums out.

former have more in common with the nation's current problems. Obama is so far not the leader his rhetoric promised he'd be. I love Henry Clay as a fellow Kentuckian. He was a fine statesman, but a Great Compromiser is not called for today and though undoubtedly a great president Lincoln, who could not represent the whole nation, is not the appropriate model for today's world and agenda. Lincoln was too embroiled in the machinations of the Civil War to be able to forge foreign and domestic policy for the poor and the oppressed. Obama needs to forget the corporate money which helped him pay for ads and remember the millions who worked and canvassed and spoke for him. We expect the change he promised us and WE ARE NOT GETTING THAT CHANGE. The times call for a true and imaginative leader. Obama could have and could still meet that call, but not unless he overrides the men he chose to advise him, the Geithners, the Summers, the Salazars et al.

JFK, as in martyred, for trying to turn a democracy into a democracy instead of a plutocracy. Those people don't play. If you disagree with me, just ask John F. Kennedy, Martin Luther King, Jr, and Bobby Kennedy what they think.

I'm surprised that President Obama has gotten many of the things accomplished that he has done so far. While they are far fewer than I would like, they represent progress. Unless the people of this nation rise up and start demanding change--in the streets, LOUD AND CLEAR, nothing will change. No President can buck the Military-Industrial-Corporate complex without the strong backing of the majority of Americans. That's why the Republicans are so vocal in opposing EVERYTHING this President does. They need to keep the 25% of Americans who are bigots, right-wing nuts, and religious fundamentalists stirred up and in a state of rage in hopes of counteracting the Left and Center.

We're fighting the corporate media propaganda machine that has lulled well over half of our fellow Americans into its blue tube trance state. We're fighting a police state that has armed, equipped, and trained its local police to look and act like black-clad robo cops who will do whatever their superior officers tell them to do. We're fighting the best-funded, best-organized effort to subvert an entire nation that the world has ever seen. We're fighting a Military-Industrial-Corporate complex that has handsomely rewarded its right-wing, anti-democratic (small d) supporters with TRILLIONS of dollars while cutting social programs to help the poor and weak and underfunding projects that would free us from the tyranny of Exxon-Mobile and the other energy giants.

President Obama needs for US to rally to his aid just as much as we need him to lead.

Tomreedtoon is right when he says that it is we who are failing the President with our lackadaisical attitude toward participatory democracy.

:applause:

:applause:

we the people have been played.
There are bailouts for the people that made the mess and the taxpayers get the bill. There are bailouts for the rich but the working people are losing their jobs and homes at record rates..where are their bailouts?
Wars are being escolated, not ended.
Healthcare? What healthcare?
Sorry but the honeymoon is over and the right wingers are still running the show..how is this change?

to keep power and status quo for the elites. Sometimes this party is called Republican, sometimes Democrat.