Come Nov 5th What Will Be Different?

Come November 5, 2008 the first black American President could be elected and for many this will be the penultimate moment of American politics. It will be a moment of history .Americans must ask why it took so long to accept an African American that didn’t have to do with sports or entertainment. And they must ask why women still wait to be taken seriously for the top leadership position in this nation.

On November 5th it could be Americans will wake up with another stolen election. An old political hack could very well steal away the hopes of all those who wanted to believe true change might occur. His evangelical picked running mate will have achieved what so many much more qualified women have not been allowed to achieve, the Vice Presidency.

Yes, November 5th will be a day of changeover but whether it is a day of change that will truly be remembered as a transformational time is doubtful. There will still be nearly 150,000 troops in Iraq and Afghanistan. What will the election bring for them? Most likely they will continue to die and kill and their minds will be scarred if not their bodies as well. They will come and go on deployments with each time going back being harder than the previous. Many will be forever traumatized and their issues will carry over to families and friends and onto the public at large.

If Americans can’t remember the troops as being the most important issue of this election and choose to think of the economy first, let them remember 10 billion dollars each month is being drained from the families of all the troops and all Americans to fight these wars. Those ten billion dollars will continue to be spent with requests for even more by the military.

The ten billion dollars will be in addition to the normal budget of the DOD each year. Americans spend more on the military than any other nation in the world. We are a nation either perpetually at war or preparing for our next war. Somehow that militarism doesn’t speak well for a nation wanting to be known as a people seeking peace.

I truly want to believe Barrack Obama is the right person to lead this nation out of the great peril it faces but there is a reality based reason I don’t believe he is that person. And I certainly know John McCain isn’t that person. McCain has shown he believes, as too many believe, that our nation can force itself on others to get our way. He thinks we can merely utter the word, democracy, and it will show our goodwill.

Electing a black politician to the Presidency for the first time is diminished if it is business as usual for the American government. All indications point to the sad fact it will continue to be just that. The oligarchy will go unfettered while the middle class will be further disbanded and the poor will be further ignored. Already banks and investment firms that have gotten bailout monies from American taxpayers are planning on huge bonuses for the upper management of firms they allowed to fail. The bailout has done nothing to help Americans facing foreclosure and poverty.

Americans must prepare themselves for the coming disillusionment brought to them by Obama or McCain. Both men and their running mates are flawed characters and flawed in character. They are beholding to the ultra rich. Jobs will continue to be lost. Homes will continue to be lost. The weak and the impoverished will get even less as they lack the advocates to speak out for them. Young Americans will continue to be pumped into the killing fields of the military machine. American politics will not change with the election of either man.

Nothing in American history demonstrates the change from the wealthy few ruling the roost. The one percent will rule over the other 99% using the carrot of capitalistic theory that working hard will pay off for any citizen. The theory of Horatio Alger being one of us is a fairy tale. The truth is we live in a socialistic nation in which the sharing of the wealth only moves upward and never moves down to the citizens most in need.

Americans freak over the concept of sharing the wealth or redistribution of wealth but fail to recognize in the last eight years, while George W. Bush was in office, the greatest redistribution of wealth in American history took place. The schemes of derivatives and selling short on the market, the no bid contracts to friends of politicians and the endless funding of war has taken the American citizen for a ride of historic proportions. It was a ride to the abyss of a failed capitalist system and the truth of the welfare for the rich programs that have stolen the wealth from the treasury.

Columnist David Sirota calls it kleptocracy. As in the continued theft of wealth from all sources by the already wealthy. If a poor nation has natural resources that are valuable, the kleptocrats will have no problem extorting, bribing or bullying to make a profit on the backs of the poor people of that nation.

If it means stealing the pittance of a monthly disability check from a mentally ill citizen, kleptocrats don’t really care because as the latest John McCain bromide sums up; they don’t want redistribution of wealth, they want“to keep what is yours”. If it means cutting back all those bad welfare programs and “entitlement” programs, so be it. The kleptocrat sees programs like Medicare and Medicaid, food stamps and Head Start as too expensive and better left to charitable organizations. They ask us to believe the wealthy and those seeking to be wealthy will fund the charitable organizations enough to care for all those they would take off the “government dole”.

Kleptocrats don’t look at bailouts and subsidies of the already wealthy as being the highest form of welfare. They don’t see tax loopholes allowing ¾ of the largest corporations in America to be free of tax burden as welfare. No, they will point out the largest dollar amount of tax revenues comes from the rich but fail to point out those same rich have had the largest incremental increase in wealth over the past decade than any other time in history. They will also fail to mention Social Security is not deducted from the Americans making over 200,000 dollars each year. Hardly a fair contribution to a fund constantly borrowed from and said to be in risk of failing in the near future.

Kleptocrats want us to believe if they stay rich the wealth will “trickle down” to the middle class and working classes. Nothing in recent history has shown this to be true. Nothing in American history has shown this to be true. Only when “big government” enforced regulations and created safety nets for the poor did some wealth “trickle down”. Only when unions were allowed to flourish, and corrupted kleptocrats kept from running them, did Americans start to own their own homes and have hopes of some of the wealth being shared.

It’s laughable to hear the fear and the belief of middle class America that a fair redistribution of wealth is a dangerous Marxist concept. Americans want to believe they’re a fair people but the facts belie such a belief. How else can the bailout of failed business executives have occurred if there wasn’t a gross lack of fairness?

Americans would like to believe they are not racist but this Presidential season has shown the ugly side of racial stereotypes that still exist all over this nation. And the ugly face of bigotry wasn’t only in Jackson, Mississippi. No, places like Erie, Pennsylvania have proved to have the same hatreds as the “deep South”. Tactics led by Karl Rove have had constant code words and symbols of racism to fuel racist fears of bigots.

Americans would like to believe free speech is a revered concept but the reality is free speech is disdained by far too many of us. We only want to hear what we like and agree with. We don’t want to listen to the ideas of others that disagree with us. Most Americans reject criticism of the government but are constantly bitching about the very same government either being too big or impotent against special interests. We strike up the bands to send our troops to war and put yellow ribbons on SUVs but become enraged when the war is questioned in good faith by other Americans. We claim they are “anti-troops” even though that is not what is being said at all.

Most of us have grown up with the attention span of a two year old when it comes to political issues. We want our thinking shaped by 30 second or 60 second sound bites that give us distortions and outright lies. We accept a system rewarding a candidate with the deepest pockets and the best script writers. Few of our politicians can interact with their constituencies because so few of the “real” people have access to them. We accept the mediocrity and stupidity of men and women elected to office entrusted with grave issues; like wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. We accept capitulation without debate by Congress to a disgraceful President hell bent on starting a war. We learn the truth of the corrupted reasons for war and passively allow the killing to continue.

November 5th will be a day of awakening. We will awake to an election of a new President and a new Congress but the corrupted system of special interests and oligarchy will remain in place. Palms will be greased by corporate interests. Deals will be made in corporate offices by the people elected based on the inane sound bites.

The sad part of the election of 2008 is the faith of the younger generation lost when the promises are forgotten by the elected. Americans of my generation have become immune to the lies and corruption. We have come to expect it. We owe the new generation of Americans a better future. We have failed them.

In 1971 after my deployment in Vietnam I became an activist. My generation was big on saying we would change the world. We bragged we would take on the “system” and make things different. As my life has fast-forwarded to my 60th year, those promises of change have resulted in eight years of Reagan and Bush. We didn’t change the system. We allowed the system to become a sewer that has poisoned the very fabric of our nation. I still love my country but I abhor what my generation has allowed my country to become.

I’d like to dream something other than the nightmares of the war I foolishly went to fight. I’d like to dream the generation of my sons and my grandchildren will face a better world than the one I faced in 1967. I’d like to dream there are new leaders that will emerge to bring the young hope and integrity. I’d like to dream and hope the way Martin Luther King dreamt. I’d like to dream the activists of my generation carried through with the promises. I fear I’ll wake up November 5th and discover dreams of a moral America are just a dream. I fear November 5th will be just another day of the nightmare we’ve allowed to happen.

Wm. Terry Leichner, RN
Denver VVAW member
USMC Combat vet – 1967-1969 RVN
http://visopeace.blogspot.com