A time and need for change and what it means to me

I have spent a lot of time recently getting my fixes of the political landscape. With the current election progressing the way it is, how could a political junkie not get a daily fix? I get a lot of news from CNN, Fox, MSNBC, and local news channels to that I feel that I get at least a smattering of varying perspectives and coverage. I also spend a lot of time discussing politics with folks on the various political discussion forums. A lot of the discussions center around the two extreme perspectives of the political spectrum, and these discussions along with the news has given me a much different view of politics and our government from what I had when I was 20, 30, 40, or even 50. One of the things that I have become concerned about most recently, is the absolute polarization of the country between the far left and the far right. If you visit any of the large political discussion forums you continually see the folks squaring off between the ultra conservatives, and the ultra liberal factions. What I have found is that neither side willing to compromise on their perspectives essentially settling nothing, much like our current situation in the national government.

We have a tremendous number of things that need to be fixed in this country, and we have gotten nothing but continual doses of fear and doom from the conservative side, and nothing but continual finger pointing and failure to take responsibility from the liberal side. But neither extreme is willing to move toward the other to compromise to actually accomplish anything meaningful, resulting in continual grid lock and stalling, and failing to fix any of our major problems.

On the issue of Iraq there is a great majority of the American people that believe that we were led down the terror path to war in Iraq with no understanding of what it was going to require to extricate ourselves, and were convinced of the need for war, on faulty, and to be honest, exaggerated intelligence that under more strenuous examination could have kept us from this unwarranted predicament in the first place. While 20/20 hindsight is always perfect, even in the initial discussions of the need for invasion, there were only tenuous and highly suspect links between Al-Qaeda and Iraq. There was insufficient proof of WMDs even in the most cursory review of the UN inspector reports. But the Administration pushed the buttons of fear and national security for force a resolution that they obviously wanted, but drastically took our attention from where it was most required in the tracking and capture or killing of the actual 9/11 supporting terrorists in Afghanistan. Democrats not wanting to look weak followed the Administration lead and toed the line to save face rather than stand and require substantial verifiable proof before agreeing to authorize the use of force in Iraq. Both sides failed us, the Administration by jumping into a second front that was never required, and the Congress by not doing their duty to require reasonable proof before authorizing. Now we are in two wars, with no real plan to extricate ourselves other than providing occupation forces for the foreseeable future, while we continue to put the Afghanistan front on a back burner and allow the Taliban and Al-Qaeda to reinvigorate, and grow stronger in that area. And the deficit continues to grow at an alarming rate with no plan on how to pay for it other than printing more green backs. This two front war on terrorism has created a situation that is intolerable at best, and unsustainable at worst. In the mean time the conservatives dig in, and the liberals dig in, and our young military people continue to die, and spend increasingly longer tours in a place we should have never gone.

On the issue of Illegal immigration, the vast majority of American people believe that something has to be done to control and manage the inflow of illegal immigrants through our boarders. The current estimate is that there are 12 million or more illegal immigrants in the U.S. and the number is growing. The current administration tried to negotiate a comprehensive immigration reform program with congress, only to be torpedoed by the two extremes of the political spectrum. The conservatives demanded securing the borders first and then deportation of the illegal immigrants already in the country. The liberals demanded some form of realistic approach to allow the current illegal immigrants a path to citizenship and a focus on securing the borders. The conservatives pounded on the fear buttons again, blaming the immigration issue for the down turn in the economic prospects and threw the fear of terrorist infiltration through our unsecured borders for the need for a wall and a big one first. The liberals having felt fooled by the Administration on Iraq, failed to believe that the threat from terrorist infiltration was as severe as advertised, and focused more on the plight of the immigrants and wanted to make the road to citizenship as painless as possible. Consequently nothing actually got achieved, neither the securing of the border, or a realistic plan on dealing with the 12 million people in our country illegally. Again the two extremes focused on not giving in to the other side so that they could claim being “right”, and the rest of us suffer the consequences of no progress on either front simply because the two extremes can’t compromise.

Our corporate tax structure and individual tax laws are so archaic and unmanageable that no one from either side of the political spectrum can figure out how to give middle and lower level income working people a tax break without giving tax breaks to the corporate raiders, and the financial elite who continually fund campaigns to ensure that they get first crack at the “appropriate” legislation. The passing of NAFTA has been a major contributor to the current economic problems, by providing incentives for American companies to move jobs and manufacturing outside the U.S. and drive lower the incomes of those few workers that remain. We have provided a bankruptcy law that protects the financial corporations who prey on low and middle income families with “zero” interest or down payment schemes to lure people into extending themselves farther financially than both they and the financial institutions know they can afford. Both conservatives and liberals have failed the middle class of America by pandering to the corporate and financial elite at the expense of the middle class, and they wonder why the 2/3 consumer driving portion of our economy can’t keep the ever expanding deficit and budget deficit afloat. More Americans are going to lose their homes due to mortgage company greed in throwing away responsible lending practices, in order to make the quick buck sale, and garner the up front fees. And when the housing market bubble caused by the rampant speculation brought on by this race for profit at the expense of reason, the government looks to support the financial institutions rather than finding a way to help the families that are not only losing their homes, but crippling their ability to afford the now sky rocketing rental rates. The conservatives don’t want to provide any solution that doesn’t bail out the corporate sharks who created this problem, and the liberals don’t want to provide any solution that doesn’t bail out the people who knowingly over extended themselves without thought of changing circumstances. So nothing meaningful gets resolved because the two sides can’t afford to move away from the ingrained extremes of their respective political poles.

Our national health care situation is now bordering on a crisis, yet neither side is willing to move to do anything other than talk about how sad it is that families can’t afford health insurance, and large health providers having a right to make ever increasing profits. Conservatives support the HMOs, and private institutions as the way to provide adequate health care, but fail to realize that profit and providing necessary expensive care do not coexist in the corporate world. Liberals support the government intervention in the provision of health care, either by single payer (i.e. government) or mandated health insurance purchases regardless of ability to pay. While the two sides bicker and fight with each other, millions of Americans are caught in a health care vice where insurance is unaffordable, and care is metered by the profit percentage. The elderly and retired of our country are increasingly forced to choose between barely being able to feed and house themselves, and affording the health care that is a natural consequence of aging.

We have required people to pay into a Social Security system their entire lives with the promise that the monies paid in would be there for them when they retired to provide a safety net. All the while both conservatives and liberals have without hesitation dipped into those funds to decrease spending gaps for bridges to nowhere, parks, and every other pet project of the politicians except for what it was intended for. We have provided corporate bankruptcy laws that make it cheaper to simply default on pension plans that were supposed to be the primary retirement means of middle America, and stolen from the Social Security funds so that there is no safety net remaining. Yet even something so obvious as the insolvency of Social Security and Medicaid can not stir the two sides from their implacable polarization to move to solve the problem, we remain at a bickering “they said”, “they said” war of words with no solution in sight while the elderly hope without reason that all the money they paid in during their working lives will be enough to keep a roof over their head, some food in the fridge, and some health insurance that will not force their family to have to declare bankruptcy to acquire.


We need a change in the political landscape. And the required change is not a swing from the conservative extreme to the liberal extreme. The change needed is a return to the principles of our original founding ideas of compromise for the good of the majority, rather than the myopic polarization of the radical extremes. We need a government concerned about the majority of working class Americans that provide the foundation and hard work that is the base of this great experiment in democracy. We can no longer afford the debilitating grid lock of extreme conservative, and extreme liberal bickering that provides nothing but stalemate. We can no longer afford to pander to the corporate and financial elite who take the labor of the middle class and then discard them. We can no longer afford the notion of ever increasing government expenditures without fiscal responsibility. We must have a political landscape that encourages compromise to actually solve the vast problems that we face. We must step away from the use of fear to remove individual freedoms so hard won centuries ago. It is time for our politicians to go back to work for us instead of themselves. Whether the leader of this change is a conservative, a moderate, or a liberal is of less importance than their willingness to drive compromise and movement to actually solve the problems of our country instead of encouraging stalemate due to radical ideological differences. The time to do away with the last 40 years of polarized political posturing is upon us. The time to step away from the politics as usual is painfully obvious. The question is do we have the intelligence and resolve to force such a change upon ourselves?