America is fed up.........



Thw Economist's view.



Americans are fed-up.

I believe I speak for the majority when I say we are fed up with political life at all levels. We are fed up with the corruption, the sense of entitlement, the lies, the slander, the sinecures, the rape of the middle class, the outrageous cost of legal, medical and other professional and non-professional services, the overweening greed of politicians and bankers, the absence of empathy for those torn asunder financially and emotionally by the recent economic crises, the hunger for power and money and the relinquishment of those values we hold so dear about the quality of life and the integrity of those who represent us. Moreover, I have special disregard for those many pundits, broadcasters, spokespersons and the like who make the above case against their political opposition while casting themselves and their party as next to God in holiness. To borrow your imaginative expression, we are going tits up and we are doing this to ourselves. We are political cannibals consuming the flesh of our enemies.

Testaments are emerging in the thousands of individuals who are suffering financial loss because of increasing costs and stagnant wages and salaries. Despair prevails as we witness foreclosure after foreclosure and to top that off, some banks are now placing a freeze on foreclosures because they cannot trace the paper trail leading to the actual owner of mortgage holders throughout the financial world. I should think the banks would by now have gotten their act together.

I am deeply intrigued by the change in party branding that is occurring under my very eyes. The political left was once thought to represent the people, the downtrodden, the underdog, the workers, the poor. This emerged straight out of Marx and the European Socialists and manifest itself in the massive changes brought about through political action by unions in particular as a counterbalance to the industrial revolution and all its inequities and inhumanities. The political right, on the other hand, represented the rich, the aristocratic, the entrepreneurial and the political and military institutions that supported them.

The task of the right was to control the masses so as not to destroy or even threaten the financial and political infrastructure that enabled the rich to retrain their power and wealth. Thousands of laws were enacted with this in mind and in the process, social control mechanisms were introduced to maintain public order and the status quo.

Recently, the political left has been branded as the faction most desirous of controlling, organizing, systematizing, counting, pigeon-holing, recording, and regimenting the public at large. It is the left that now seeks to maintain DNA records, insert implants and to monitor telecommunications and travel.

The right, meanwhile, is promoting social values including the right to be left alone, privacy, basic freedoms, fewer regulations. It is as if the right is now the oppressed class, and the left is the bete noir.

Opponents of the left use Hitler as an example of left wing politics gone wrong. This is indeed a point of dire confusion to me as I always regarded the totalitarian regimes of Germany and the USSR in particular as classic examples of right wing domination. The journey from leftist origins to right wing power regimes was short and bloody, but the end result was a coalition of political, economic and military power under a non-benevolent dictator who, to my thinking, was decidedly right wing. Hence, I viewed the political right as authoritarian, powerful, controlling, solidly aligned with economic and military institutions and very much involved in matters of state (and regime and personal) security.

Today, I find a blending of traditional right and left values in both parties and I continually want to cherry pick those values which best suit my understanding of what is good. Hence, my Independent status as a voter, even though Independents have been traditionally castigated as closet Democrats. Lately, however, Independents are emerging as converts to Tea Party and Libertarian values, whatever they are. It is not that I don't have any idea what these values are, but that those who espouse them seem radically different in their definitions.