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in the global market for green technologies.
But it certainly seems like the whole Democratic team that could have been standing up together to tell the truth about GOP failures and push for stronger change, even as President Obama talked about bipartisanship, is equally, if not more intimidated, than the Democratic team that didn't rise up to oppose the Bush coup and challenge those election results more thoroughly and courageously.
If my Democrats had stood together against that corruption and held fast for Al Gore, we probably would not have ended up with right wing judicial activists on our Supreme Court. He would not have appointed judicial activists who longed to use the first possible case to give corporations the same free speech rights as individual natural persons.
My Democrats were intimidated by the challenge of sticking together to do the right thing way back then. They pretended that the public preferred the idiotic Beer Guy to the Dorky Al Gore. Washington pundits loved to criticize awkward Al Gore but figured The Beer Guy's many faults didn't matter in the face of his apparent charm. My Democrats took shelter in the rules of the Senate and House. They pretended it would not be civil to challenge those apparent results.
My Democrats allowed the election of a war monger president and war monger VP to stand, rather than courageously challenge those tainted results. And our co-opted corporate-dominated media was continuing to roll out the "why the Democrats failed" stories and "the country can't take the insecurity of undecided results" stories to strengthen the coup.
Even after that bitter experience led to disaster, I've still been surprised that more of my Democratic majorities didn't hang together during President Obama's first two years to demand single payer remain on the table, demand a massive infrastructure-repair jobs program like the WPA after the Bush Crash, financed by the expiration of the Bush tax cuts proven to have failed to create jobs. The GOP way had failed. Democratic legislators could have been bipartisan in showing that Democratic policies are fiscally responsible as the GOP has said it wanted to be, because infrastructure jobs put cash into the hands of workers who will spend it, not millionaires who will hoard it as they have been doing.
But my Democratic majorities didn't dare do that as a block. They pretended they had to compromise and give up the most effective Democratic policies. That gave the Professional Right the chance to push their Tough Guys Win ideology on the public. Facts don't matter; toughness does. You are scared. You need tough guys. Let's make the Dems compromise over and over again so they look like wimps. Then let's stir up some frightened super right wingers into teabag groups so we can show that the GOP has to move even further right to accommodate that noisy flank.
I had hoped that Truth & Reconciliation proceedings, or allowing the Spanish court to prosecute the Bush team for war crimes, would have shaken up "business as usual" and pushed the country in a new, more compassionate direction. That could have inspired more soul searching, including a review of our brutal outdated military policies-- shock & awe just creates more enemies for our country.
Sigh...
And even now, with the Tough Guys Win election behind us, with millions of 2008 voters staying home because their Democrats didn't stand as a block and refuse to concede to the party that crashed our economy, we have more concessions.
I have been reminded recently that many multinational corporations have a larger GDP than many countries in the world. I guess that is why they could buy themselves the power to dominate the US supreme court and get them to pretend that giant corporations deserve the private free speech rights of individual US citizens.
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