The Two Party Agenda

The Two Party Agenda
Published in The Catalyst 

         The most recent GOP Presidential Debate gathered a record 9 million TV viewers. Herman Cain, a presidential frontrunner, was applauded fiercely  by Republicans for comments he made about 'Occupy' protesters during the debate. He claimed protesters were wrong to blame unregulated banks and a government-financed Wall Street for our economic mess. "If you are unemployed, don't blame Wall Street, blame yourself" he said.

         Blame yourself...Of course it's not enough that the Republican party wants to put you on the chopping block when it comes to local and federal budget cuts- slicing into your social security, your education and your health care while both parties continue to protect the top 1%. No, according to Cain it's time you started blaming yourself for being poor!

         Republican policy, no matter how it is phrased in these messy, nasty and ultimately distracting debates, is as clear as day. Blame the poor and make them pay.

How about cutting spending where it is wasted the most? As I wrote in the Catalyst on September 9^th, the bipartisan Commission on Wartime Contracting has found tens of billions of taxpayer dollars have gone to corruption and lax oversight of contractors in Iraq and Afghanistan, not to mention the trillions spent on killing, according to the most conservative estimates 600,000 women and Children in our wars of aggression in the Middle East. Cutting spending here? No contender for the Republican nomination has interest in this.

How about we stop, as Warren Buffet put it, “coddling the super rich” and cut the budget by raising taxes on billionaires? The CBO says that would save over a trillion dollars. But of course not! Who will fund Herman Cain or Mitt Romney’s campaign if not the corporate CEOs and big bank executives? Finally, the President has stood firmly for raising taxes on the wealthiest 1%, a stance the majority of American recognize he should have taken long ago. Our president backed down on this stance when he had a Democratic majority in Congress, claiming that despite pledging not to renew the Bush-era tax cuts during the campaign, he had been convinced not to raise takes on the wealthy during a recession. Now that the recession is technically over, Obama is pushing to raise taxes on the rich. But, like the rest of the country, he knows it cannot pass the now Republican House of Representatives.

Just like he knows his promises to reign in Wall Street, hold the banks accountable and regulate the market is rhetoric of the past- all promises he has long ago abandoned. His economic advisors- nearly all of them corporate heads and corrupt bankers who have spent lifetimes championing trickle-down, anti-regulation policy, have even managed to persuade many on Wall Street to donate large sums of money to Obama’s re-election campaign, a group of businesspeople largely Republican. When running for president, Obama claimed he wanted to put an end to letting Wall Street run wild and hold the banks accountable. Eight years of this policy under Bush taught all of us that trickle-down economics of this sort does not work. Campaigning for bottom-up economics won over voters but his trickle-down policies in office have won Obama lobbyists. This principal lie of Obama’s presidency was the subject of last year’s Best Documentary Winner at the Oscars, Inside Job, a film Time Magazine and I believe is the most important movie of the century.

The reality of the 2012 election, the very sad reality, is that no matter how much worse the Republican agenda is, and it is appalling across the board, the Democrats in power also do not want not real change on the issues that matter most to Americans. They too want war. It was Obama who put 30,000 additional troops in Afghanistan and pushed his withdrawal date three years back. It was Obama that defended America remaining the only developed nation without a national curriculum in Education, instituting polices that punished struggling schools desperate for help while ramming through unpopular test-based, worse-than-Bush programs like Race to The Top and Pay-per-Performance. It was Obama who cut environmental protections and authorized further aid to Israel. It was Obama that issued silent raids on companies hiring illegal immigrants. And, most importantly, it was Obama and his Administration that has bailed out Wall Street and sold out his base. The list goes on- it cannot be denied, that as bad as the GOP is, Barack Obama is no superman. His policies have been painful for most Americans- 76% of whom believe our country is headed in the wrong direction.

Realizing our president has failed us on issue after issue while at the same time noticing the credibility his party has lost is essential in understanding the failures of our two-party system. When Bush was elected in 2004 with an approval rating of 48% he was the least popular president in history ever to be re-elected. Obama’s approval rating stood at an all-time low of 37% according to Gallup’s report on October 18^th.  The best end result this New York bred, now global ‘Occupy’ movement can have is the creation of a viable third party that really stands for the working class and unemployed.

Sure, the wise among us will vote for Obama out of a fear of the alternative. But we can at least hope that instead of being forced to make that decision, a viable third party can come out of all this ‘Occupy’ business. If not now, when? Refusing to demand a third party is not worth more status quo liars in the White House fighting only for the 1%. I’d rather take votes away from Obama for the sake of America having a populist third party down the road than vote for the so-called “lesser of two evils” and watch America continue to get flushed down the toilet. We need real change in 2012, not more two-party bull.