You Think So?

It's a tried-and-true formula: If you want to pick the pockets of taxpayers in this country, you distract them with relatively minor issues.

It works every single time.

Oh lookie there: Here's gay marriage. Oh, no, look over here--there's immigration. And over here, there is gun control. And over here, there's abortion.

All of these issues, while they may be important to some people, don't amount to a whole lot in the grand scheme of things. What ARE the big issues have to do with economics and the destruction of the American way of life by a neoliberal cabal which controls both political parties:

The 2008 financial crisis should have resulted in the final discrediting of the Clinton-era, DLC and “Third Way”-style politics. The deregulation bill which Clinton signed unleashed Wall Street greed, giving it the freedom to accelerate the destruction of the middle class – and ultimately, to nearly destroy the global economy.

This pseudo-centrist school calls itself “moderate” and “centrist,” despite the fact that poll after poll has affirmed that its economic policies – on Social Security, Medicare, Wall Street regulation, and taxing corporations and the wealthy – are far to the right of public opinion. In many cases polls show that their positions are to the right of Republican voter opinion.

But the corporate Dems caught two lucky breaks. First, in a sign of society’s often-underestimated capacity for change, public opinion shifted strongly toward support for gay marriage. Most Republicans are unwilling or unable to do to capitalize on that shift, since that would alienate their base. In a second lucky break, the Republicans have been increasingly extreme and barbaric in their stated positions about reproductive rights, women’s health, and women’s rights overall. (That is a shift. Few people remember that Republican President Gerald Ford supported the Equal Rights Amendment in the 1970s, for example.)