IT´S THE IDEOLOGY STUPID!

...The divide between the two political parties continues to grow.

An implied declaration from the current Republican Party is: "To hell with the average working American".

As in the past, the problems we face today can be solved. However, counter to what some people are saying, the problem is not due to a structural problem with our politics.

The issues that are keeping the US Congress from getting any business done is that, where there use to be both moderate Republicans and moderate Democrats, today those moderates are few and far between in both parties.

And when the far-righties controlling the House and the "fake" Tea Party have their #1 goal of replacing President Obama with their own ideological president, they will do whatever necessary to keep the government from accomplishing anything for the people. (I say "fake", because the Tea Party is no longer a ground-swell organization. It is mainly organized and financed by far right organizations such as Freedom Works and Karl Rove´s, American Crossroads, courtesy of an activist, conservatively controlled, US Supreme Court.)

And the Democrats aren´t helping the situation as some of them continue to say that they want to start a more progressive third political party due to "structural problems in our Democratic party".

History has shown time and again, that in a system where it´s majority rule and "winner take all", one of the two largest parties will always be the winner. In other words, if the progressives decided to pull out of the Democratic party and then started a third party, it would offer a final result of dividing and conquering both the Democratic party along with the new progressive party.

Nations with multiple parties have elections that are not, "winner take all". The government control in these countries is divided amongst all of the participating political parties. As an example, if there is a national election where there are five parties competing, when the election is over, the government would then be represented by all five parties in the proportions that were decided by the nation´s voters. The result would be that the largest party could over-rule each of the smaller parties. But in many situations, the smaller parties could join together to over-come a larger party.

Unfortunately, for the US, it was decided many years ago by our forefathers that the US would be a republic and the elections would be "winner take all", not divided between the participating parties. This is why the GOP, always a smaller party than the Democrats, continues attempting to keep the Democrats away from the election polls. It´s also why the Republicans try to make it so difficult for the elderly, the poor, the legal immigrants and the very young from registering to vote. (These specific groups usually tend to vote mostly Democratic.)

This has not been a big problem in our nation´s past politics because the largest group of lawmakers in congress has usually been mostly moderate politicians. Yes, there were always the extremist at the ends of both the progressive and the conservative organizations. But by and large, the largest group of both parties were moderates. Being moderates, it allowed for the "give and take" in their negotiations, which allowed for both parties to come to reasonable conclusions for doing the people´s business.

That is not the case today.

Since the US Supreme Court confirmed that "corporations are people", "money is corporate free-speech" and "corporations can spend unlimited amounts of their ´free-speech´ in political campaigns", the GOP is now surgically attached to the corporations, their money and their ideology. Due to this commitment by the GOP, America is on the way to becoming a corporate run Oligarchy.

Therefore, it´s not the party´s political structure that is a problem, it´s their current different ideologies that are separating the two parties.

Let´s face it, the Republicans have never really cared about the average, working, middle-class American, except when they needed to get the public´s vote. And that´s still the case today.

However, the GOP members today have decided, that to get their needed votes, they have chosen to blatantly lie to the general public. They will then use their vast amounts of available corporate "free-speech" to pay for the many TV and radio ads that continually parrot their false information and their "Republican talking points".

As a case in point, all of the Republican presidential candidates in their many presidential primary TV debates have boldly stated that, "President Obama´s 2010 stimulus package failed to save or create one US job."

And that is a bare-faced lie.

They keep presenting this lie, even though the non-partisan Office of Management & Budget (OMB) and the Congressional Budget Office (CBO), have both officially stated, "It is estimated that in the fourth quarter of 2010, there were somewhere between 1.3 million and 3.5 million people who were then employed, who would not have been had the stimulus not been enacted."

But the conservatives, with the support of conservative talk-radio hosts and GOP TV, (aka: Fox News) continue spreading the false info that the stimulus didn´t work. And most well respected economists had admitted at the beginning, that the stimulus was actually too small for a country the size of the US. They also stated that it had too many tax cuts and not enough infrastructure revenue. (And this was all due to the Republicans not allowing the stimulus to be as big as it should have been in the first place.)

The same kinds of problems have been happening with the new "Obamacare".

Most progressives in congress have already made clear that they are willing not only to increase revenue through tax increases, but to also cut future Medicare costs. (Obamacare did both, and it was attacked by Republicans for doing so...?) Even the Democrats on the failed supercommittee had caved to the Republicans and offered substantial entitlement cuts. But the Republicans once again said "no" because the Democrats rightly refused a deal that would squander years of future tax revenue in the name of keeping taxes low on corporations and the wealthiest Americans.

The basics of the Republican´s corporate ideology is to clearly declare that "We have no shame! We will lie, cheat and steal wherever it´s needed in order to achieve our corporate master´s goals of lower taxes and more de-regulation." In other words, "To hell with the average working American".

So, for the future, the only way this stalemate will be settled will be for all the progressives and centrists to unite as are the Occupy Wall Street groups. To remove the zealots from political office and replace them with real moderates. To stop allowing corporations to be "people" and their money to be "free-speech", and to get the big money out of politics by having publically funded elections.

It´s a big group of issues to solve, but they are solvable. But they will only be solved if we have the desire and wherewithal to get it done. It´s up to us.

Author´s Comment:Late breaking news: In the 5th poll since 2006, the latest poll released by Fairleigh Dickinson University once again found that people who get their news from Fox News know significantly less about news both in the U.S. and the world than people who watch no news at all.

Copyright: G.Ater 2011

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