Wholesale Charade

Hallelujah! Every four years there’s a Presidential election, and We the People should be excited about this exercise of our Constitutionally guaranteed democratic rights. Wrong! It’s a pathetic charade that has nothing at all to do with the sort of republic of the free stakeholders that the founders of this nation had in mind when they wrote the Constitution. Instead, the stakeholders are mostly under water on their mortgages, the banksters and other corporate titans who control both parties have their way, and the rest of us have been categorically disenfranchised.

Thanks to a Republican-dominated Supreme Court—an institution the founders never intended to have such power—elections in the United States are now commodities for sale to the highest bidder. With a nation wrecked by Wall Street fraud, leaving the taxpayers stuck with a future of deep debt and a vast army of the unemployed and underemployed, the choice on Election Day 2012 boils down to good cop Obama and bad cop Romney.

If you still have any doubts about the two major parties’ common endorsement of the financial industry’s greed, refer to Neil Barofsky’s book Bailout: An Inside Account of How Washington Abandoned Main Street While Rescuing Wall Street. A former federal prosecutor, Barofsky details his services as the special inspector general for TARP (Troubled Asset Relief Program) during the George W. Bush and Barack Obama administrations. Barofsky had contributed to the 2008 Obama campaign and voted for him even though Bush had appointed him to his inspector general position. He had done so expecting that a Democratic President would be more vigilant in policing the banks but was quickly disappointed. In Barofsky’s first meeting with a team made up of Wall Street hustlers, he and his top assistant learned that the much vaunted Obama “change” would be more of the same.