The Coming Shitstorm

For a while now (1+ years) I’ve not posted to this blog. Chalk it up to perceived obsolescence of the form, apathy, despondence, whatever. My husband has inspired me to start writing again. And I don’t mean posting angry (yet justified) missives on Facebook and Twitter. Sometimes the long form is best.

Any day (month?) now a Republican pol (or corporate hack - what’s the difference?) will declare her candidacy for President of the United States of America. It seems a lot is at stake, but unlike 2004 there is no pretense at sanity among the elite of the Great Other Party. Fortunately this time sanity - the real kind - will likely win out in the end, but much damage will have been done in the meantime.

The Tea-Party-controlled U.S. House of Representatives has gone on a full-scale attack against working people, with no let-up in sight.
Sadly Obama seems to be going along with an alarmingly large portion of their extremist agenda. Tax cuts for the rich, for whom income tax rates are at their lowest since before FDR, do not strike a single member of the GOP majority as an obstacle to fiscal health - it’s as if there is a full-scale denial of reality here. There’s a deficit problem for the federal government? Well, then, everyone must pray to [what Paul Krugman terms] the “Confidence Fairy,” since through austerity measures like spending cuts to crucial programs and projects, corporate America will suddenly create millions of new high-paying, high-skilled jobs! Everyone knows how well that has played out in Britain! Complete delusion.

No, the Republican Party of today is so through the looking glass that if Ronald Reagan were to come back from the dead and run for a House seat in a district in California, say, or for a Senate seat in Illinois (his home state) - he would be drubbed out of the primaries by the tea-bagging fringe of (that now controls) his party. On almost every issue facing the country today a lie is concocted to justify their mean-spirited side.

Fascism takes root in environments such as 2011 Wisconsin, or 2011 Ohio, or 2011 Indiana, and can easily spread east and west from there. If Scott Walker gets to sign the union-busting bill into law in Wisconsin - it would only take ONE Democratic state senator re-entering the state, by the way - the damage done will be huge. Add this on top of the widely expected passage into law of an even more draconian bill in Ohio, and you have quite the shitstorm of plutocracy and fascism.

Wake up, Obama, and smell the “tea.” You can stand up to the bullies or you can appease them. Guess who and what will lose if you appease them.