America's Changing Society

By Timothy Gatto

Oped News

Change can be strange, and the situation in this country is getting stranger by the moment. Many people have stopped trying to make sense of what passes for "news". Senator Bernie Sanders was in the Senate today trying to explain that tax cuts for the wealthy that would add 600 billion dollars to the Federal deficit in the middle of a recession isn't a good idea. I doubt he'll make any headway. They all know what he's saying is true, they just don't care. It's a good thing that there are some Democrats out there that are still fighting Obama's cute little deal with the Republicans, but later on, when push comes to shove, most of them will fold. This is just for show. Money talks in America.

Wikileaks is still a big deal and has provided us with yet another glimpse into the mangled mind of a certain Connecticut Senator;

"I certainly believe that WikiLeaks has violated the Espionage Act, but then what about the news organizations -- including The Times -- that accepted it and distributed it? To me, The New York Times has committed at least an act of bad citizenship, and whether they have committed a crime, I think that bears a very intensive inquiry by the Justice Department," Lieberman, I(nsane)-Conn., said on Fox News.

So now we enter the nether-world of government censorship of the news. Senator Lieberman, with this statement, has put every news media outlet in the nation on notice that reporting news that makes the government look bad could very well be a crime. It doesn't matter if every newspaper on the Globe carried the story on the front page, if you are an American newspaper; you had better watch what you say.

The entire World is watching this drama unfold. The public figures that have vilified Julian Assange must realize how badly their words make the United States appear, although I really don't believe that they do. People like Lieberman and Hillary Clinton have climbed so far down the rabbit hole that they no longer have a grasp on reality.   These are people that believe their own propaganda. They have been serving out this Kool-Aid for so long that they have begun to sample it themselves.

The Wikileaks story isn't the only example of people in government dodging reality. We have a President that believes his own "spin" on political events. Here we have a Harvard Law School graduate giving the American people the most nonsensical reasons for back pedaling on almost everything he told us he believed in. This is a man that seems to believe that anything he does is quite all right as long as his "heart" is in the right place.

Frankly I'm sick of his "good intentions".   I never liked Back Obama in the first place, but now I've come to actually despise him. It's almost impossible to do the kind of damage he's done without some kind of a plan. Allow me to list just some of the things he's managed to accomplish in his first two years.

1.        He's foisted a "health-care" bill on Americans that could make a pharmaceutical lobbyist blush. Now Americans must get health insurance from private insurers or pay a fine (no matter how expensive they make it). The Union members that have great healthcare plans (courtesy of long battles between workers and management) that will now be taxed. He made sure it is still illegal to pay less for drugs out of Canada. Medicare and Medicaid payments to health providers will face cuts.

2.        We have a war in Afghanistan as well as military adventures in Yemen, Somalia and of course Iraq. We have managed to use NATO to encircle China and Russia. We have military pacts with almost every nation on Earth that promises U.S. assistance in the event they are attacked. We've installed military bases in almost every nation in South Asia (almost all of the "Stans). We are closer to war in Korea than at any time since the last one there. The military budget is larger than at any time under the Bush Administration. We bomb Pakistan with drones. We want to re-introduce nuclear weapons on the Korean Peninsula. We now have "tactical nuclear weapons" that "regional field commanders" have command and control over.

3.        We have made no diplomatic gains with Iran. We continue to threaten them over their "nuclear program" even though all of our numerous intelligence agencies insist that they stopped their nuclear weapons program in 2003. We have a carrier group off their coast with war plans already drawn up.

4.        We subsidized almost every financial corporation on Wall Street with trillions of American tax-dollars. The government celebrates GM's economic recovery while the taxpayers receive nothing and investors reap rich rewards, forgetting the workers that took in some cases, a 50% pay cut or loss of their jobs.

I could go on and on and on. Some believe that Obama should face a primary in 2012. I believe a primary, regardless of who is president should be a requirement.   We really need a new political party or a coalition of the existing ones. Something has got to be done, trouble is, who's going to do it?

I believe it is up to us, you me and everyone else we know. We should all be creaming like hell. The only people in this country that are making money are the big Wall Street firms, defense contractors and the politicians and media moguls.

We saw how a dedicated group of people can make a difference. Supporters of Wikileaks temporarily shut down MasterCard and Visa. Maybe this is the beginning of something larger. Many people are tired of being used and taken advantage of.   It seems like we are a nation that is increasingly being made up of the have and have-nots, and the middle class is disappearing quickly. The only reason more Americans have not become disenchanted with the way things are in America is because our middle-class was always robust. People had always believed that their children would have a better life than their parents. This no longer seems to be a given. The death of the American middle-class will only result in more people resisting what they perceive as a system that offers no rewards.

This is a situation that is being ignored by our political elite at their own peril. Wars being perpetrated by the military industrial complex and an economic system that survives on the backs of its workers cannot survive indefinitely.   The rampant unemployment and the collapse of the middle class in America will bring changes. Changes our political elite may not embrace.