Log in Subscribe

It Will Continue for Exactly as Long as We Allow It

Posted
This week, Democrats got what should have been a massive wake-up call via off-year elections in Virginia and New Jersey that do not bode well for next year's midterms. It was probably no coincidence that Dems finally came together to pass an infrastructure bill by the close of business on Friday, but the party nevertheless made up convenient false narratives that suggested it will largely continue to serve the special interests who stuff the campaign coffers at the expense of the working-class Americans it purports to represent.

As an extremely non-partisan independent who thinks both parties are filled choc to the brim with the brown stuff, my relationship with readers tends to ebb and flow based on who holds power. I analyze and opine on public policy for a living. Naturally, whichever party has the most power in creating that policy is going to be the one that gets the majority of criticism at that particular moment, especially when they're both so objectively awful.

For the nearly 12 years that I've been at TBT, the Florida legislature and all of our local governments have been dominated by Republicans, which is why I so often get accused as being a partisan liberal from those on the right, as if it's my fault the RPOF is a blatantly corrupt organization or that local Republican politics are controlled by greedy developers who, if they weren't stuffing one party's coffers to get what they want, would just as eagerly be stuffing the others'.

I grew up very poor in a working-class, union family, most of whom voted D since at least FDR because, for a long time, if you were of the class that got your bath after work rather than before, as they say, your interests would be better served. Those days, however, are long gone. Today's Democratic institution might play-act using working-class rhetoric, but it exists to serve millionaires and billionaires, Big Banks, Big Pharma, Big Tech, and other special interests that stroke the Big Checks.

At the same time, the days of Republican conservatism in terms of an ideology are also long gone. Republicans consistently run up the biggest debts and then cartoonishly feign an interest in fiscal responsibility whenever Democrats have the power of the purse. The party exists to deregulate any market the industries filling their bank accounts deem necessary for economic growth and to make sure that the extremely rich among us and big, highly-profitable corporations don't ever even have to contemplate paying their fair share of taxes.

How does a two-party system that consistently screws over 80 percent of the country remain in power, you might ask? That's simple. Play into the tribal nature of human beings and convince the electorate that there's something else happening entirely: an epic battle of good vs. evil with the fate of our nation hanging in the balance. All we have to do is stop those evil (fill in the blank based on your biases) and all will be well. To the disappointment of anyone paying close attention, all but a small minority fall for it and, because of corporate media and the technological advances of social media, the result is a world in which posting an endless stream of snarky memes passes for being politically engaged.

In Tuesday's races, longtime Democratic establishment hack and incumbent Virginia governor Terry McAuliffe lost to private equity shill Glenn Youngkin, a half-billionaire who most recently ran the Carlyle Group; and New Jersey Governor Phil Murphy eked out a reelection victory, while the most powerful Democrat in New Jersey lost to a truck driver with no campaign money.

The Virginia race was particularly telling. It would take an entire column to explain what a bunch of shitheels the Carlyle Group is but, even more interesting, is the fact that McAuliffe couldn't bring up Youngkin's ties to them. Why? Because McAuliffe, who's worth a cool $30 million himself, was an investor in É the Carlyle Group. Seriously, you can't make this stuff up, and the parallels between the United States and the fall of Rome are piling up faster than the brown stuff in D.C. gutters.

Nonetheless, talking head after talking head made the rounds on corporate media shows Wednesday to explain that it was all a message about Biden moving too far to the left and needing to move back toward the center, which is code for do nothing to rock the boat and instead concentrate on the desires of the special interests that keep the whole show afloat. Then they blamed racism and school board meetings and parents being upset about teaching critical race theory. Anyone who's actually to the left of the Democratic establishment surely found that to be hilarious, until they realized it was cover for spending more energy fighting to save things like the SALT tax exemption.

And before Republicans clap back, need I remind you that the corrupt leaders of your party had the White House and Senate for four years and the whole kit and caboodle for two of them and didn't follow through on its promises to the people either. Where was the infrastructure bill? Where was the long-promised replacement plan for the Affordable Care Act? Where was the comprehensive immigration reform package? Nothing but tax cuts, deregulation, and rhetoric about a wall and whetherAllLives Matteror Blue Lives Matter more was a better slogan with which to own the libs.

What part about this do most Americans not get? When our two-party system and its corporate media, which has all the intellectual honesty of a professional wrestling commentator, has nothing of substance to offer the masses in a democracy, culture wars are the only thing left to keep people showing up on Election Day. Most Americans wouldn't be thinking about gender issues, bathroom laws, religious nonsense, and whether it's okay for a 17-year-old kid growing up in a world where he or she can literally pull up bestiality on their smartphone to be assigned Toni Morrison's Beloved, were the corporate media not constantly shoving such nonsensical news down their throats.

Conveniently, this allows the media to skip things like, Hey, what's going on with all the troops still in Iraq and Syria, or Doesn't the real spending problem lie in our Pentagon budget which is much larger than all social welfare spending combined? Or, even more important to most Americans, why do we keep finding out that more and more billionaires pay no taxes at all because of a loophole that allows them to be compensated in stock, borrow against said stock, pay it back at the time of their death, and then pass it on to their heirs at present value, effectively avoiding taxes on decades of compensation and financial gains altogether?

How much press has the record number of workers striking for better conditions gotten in comparison to transgender issues? Why? Not because of sympathy for a marginalized group. Rather, because the corporate media doesn't want to amplify anything that doesn't benefit their paymasters, or, at the very least, distract Americans from the things that would be bad for those interests. Let's talk instead about whether Let's Go Brandon should be considered hate speech and vaccine mandates vs. antivaxxers with no nuanced discussion of science, just talking heads, bullet points, and soundbites pitching to one side or the other.

These sorts of culture war issues also allow rich elites to feel good about their values while still hoarding wealth, leaving massive carbon footprints, and avoiding paying into the very system they were able to exploit. A Black Lives Matter sign on the well-manicured lawn of your gated-community home costs nothing. Paying an effective tax rate anywhere near your actual bracket in that scenario gets much, much more expensive, even though the revenue they are withholding can actually matter in terms of programs targeting the groups they purport to care so much about. Real solutions have real costs, while rhetoric and virtue signaling is essentially free.

The corporate media is also working night and day to tie the very term progressives to all of the culture war nonsense from the left, rather than acknowledging that it's those institutional Dems driving such wedge issues as a distraction from the economic policies being pushed from the actual left-wing of the party, which presents a threat to the economic elite. Have you heard many Democrat leaders screaming from the rafters that, for the first time in American history, America's richest 1 percent now have more wealth than the entire middle class? How about their friends in the corporate media? No signs about that on the lawns in high-property-tax neighborhoods, are there?

I've said it before and I'll say it again. If you're not rich and powerful but think that either of these institutions has your interests at heart, you're participating in your own delusion. If real change happens in this country before we finish circling the drain, it will come from the bottom up, not from the top down. It won't be a third party or an independent presidential candidate. It will be from people coming to understand that your life is more impacted by local governments than national ones, that change actually can come without money in small races, and it will grow outward from there once people learn that there are no saviors in politics, that they can only save themselves.

The problem is, we're moving at breakneck speed in the exact opposite direction, as moneyed interests work overtime to turn local politics into a mirror image of the state and national affairs I've just described. And because too many of us are willing to take the bait, we wind up with uneducated half-wits on our local boards blathering about culture war rhetoric and national political themes at the expense of the real local matters their paymasters don't want to be voiced. Ds and Rs are not lifestyle brands that tell the world you're a good person or a bad one. They're little more than cults whose leaders manipulate and pray on adherents for their own gain like cult leaders tend to do. As I've said before, you don't always get the government you want, but you usually get the one you deserve.

Dennis "Mitch" Maley is an editor and columnist for The Bradenton Times and the host of ourweekly podcast. With over two decades of experience as a journalist, he has covered Manatee County governmentsince 2010. He is a graduate of Shippensburg University and later served as a Captain in the U.S. Army. Clickherefor his bio. His 4th novel, Burn Black Wall Street Burn, was recently released and is availablehere.

Comments

No comments on this item

Only paid subscribers can comment
Please log in to comment by clicking here.