When I first started in the business of politics, I was so impressed with the many candidates I saw and many for whom I worked that I could not see beyond activism and thats how it was thru Al Gore, and Howard Dean... Then things changed, subtlely at first. I started to see how the party was going through a kind of metamorphosis it became more about them and less about what the people needed, and as the peoples suffering became worse, we became as a party less engaged, less concerned, more self interested in winning overall than doing the right thing. The more it seemed influenced by winning, the less responsive it became. And oftentimes winning meant feeding at the same trough, and as a result, my party became disconnected from the peoples needs leaving me feel disconnected, uprooted, and even that my loyalty to the party had little to do with the party being representative of what needed to be done to maintain our representative government. From the mid-eighties however my anger was starting to show with the disconnects from peoples needs, the outsourcing, the jobs going over seas or down to Mexico, with foreign countries handling privacy matters, the idea that manufacturing could be eliminated and replaced by the service sector was absurd at best and I said so. I had sat down with my friend who ran the last machine tool business in America and we bemoaned what we were becoming. Mergers, Acquisitions and business ventures became a mad rush with companies being bought left and right for pennies on the dollar...and all the buyers were interested in was a quick kill. They were not there to make things, build things, make a better world--it became only about profits. And it was a signal that the Wall Street mentality, that Greed was good! was increasingly endemic in the land. Around that time, I was writing furiously on the issues for left wing publications, and online, and getting my editorials published even in the NYTimes...still, I had faith that we could turn it around. Time proved that with one admin after another, I was wrong. And even after we got sucked into the wrong war with the wrong people, the electorate voted in GW Bush again! I couldnt believe it. my country had gone completely bonkers! But nothing was happening to improve the lot of the people . As Bush came to office, I told those who would listen, watch for Recession, and losing the last leg of the economy which had been holding on, home building and sure enough, when that went, so many wage earners and home owners went down the drain and it got worse and worse right up to the meltdown which didnt have to happen if we had had the necessary reforms in place. But we didnt. If Clinton didnt approve of the end of the banking act to please Citibank and Travelers and precipitate the end of the middle class, we could have avoided that whole scenario. We didnt however. Still, although the Right wanted us not to spend, the Democrats bailed them out, and in the process, again forgot the middle class and the poor. Clinton had started the process going by cutting down on benefits for the poor and the government looked more and more the GOP Lite....And while we are making a slow recovery now, most families have never recovered. And our government, on both sides, seems to have forgotten or never had that burning desire to make it all right. From the 90s on, thats been my private little War as I preached that government is supposed to be about the people, not the donors, the activists, the media, the influentials or the rich!....and I was attacked and bad-mouthed for my disloyalty to a party in disarray. And while I started in politics because of my concerns about the environment, and water and infrastructure, more and more, Ive become focused on the America nobody hears about anymore, the people who are being held hostage in a Third World embrace that simply is unAmerican!.....
Posted on: Sat, 19 Oct 2013 14:26:32 +0000
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