Now the Democrats Talk about Debt! Regular readers of this blog will know that I have repeatedly — starting, at latest, with my entry to this blog of April 13, 2005 — tried to get the Democratic Party to become the champion of the debt-ridden poor and middle class, to absolutely no avail. The words "debt", "usury", and "bankruptcy" did not appear on the national Democratic campaign website nor in any of the literature I received in a hotly contested campaign here in New Jersey for U.S. Senate.
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This past week (November 21st to be precise), I received an email from Democrats.com ("The Aggressive Progressives") that finally addressed the issue of "debt slavery" and linked to a website of the Consumers Union Action Fund, Inc. that contains an email piece one can send to legislators via that site. This email alert arrived two full weeks after the election!
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Why now rather than then?
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If Democrats had raised this issue and hammered away at it before the election, they could have won a "bulletproof majority" in both House and Senate that would have empowered them to pass debt-relief legislation that the President could not defeat, because Democrats would have been able to override a veto. But now? What conceivable good can such an email campaign do?
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The present, Radical Right, Republican President will have to sign off on any measure Democrats pass to give Americans debt relief, and he won't do it. So, no meaningful measure can pass, and Americans will continue to be oppressed by debt, because the Democrats refused to raise the issue when voters could actually do something about it. Now, all voters can do is make noise, not change.
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Is it all just political theater, fiction, lies? — shadow-boxing, in which an ostensible two parties are really one, controlled by the same people and forces? Are they throwing imitation punches at a make-believe, illusory opponent? putting on a show for the voters but really colluding between themselves to protect the status quo? You have to wonder.
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By the way, in looking to see when I first addressed "debt slavery", I read lower into that online archive (April 2005, which you can find in a list to the right of this main column) and found this paragraph in the entry for April 9, 2005:

It has always irritated liberals that conservatives and libertarians get to call themselves the "Right", which subliminally suggests that anyone else is "Wrong", because that's all that's "Left". Maybe we should start calling ourselves the "Good", for wanting the best for everyone, and let the selfish continue to call themselves the "Right". Among which would you rather be numbered? The Right, or The Good?

That is a really Good idea. Let's press "the Left" to present itself as "the Good".
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I was also reminded, on looking back at what I wrote a year and a half ago, that it is for me a genuine pleasure to reread my stuff. It is so hard to find things I agree with wholeheartedly, that when I see something I can agree with entirely, I am both relieved and delited. There IS a voice of sanity in the world. Alas, it's just my own, a lone and solitary voice in the wilderness of a political theater of the absurd.
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(The current U.S. military death toll in Iraq, according to the website "Iraq Coalition Casualties", is 2,872 — for Israel.)




- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 11:59 PM