[Ccarc] Middle Class gets the "bird"

[Tom Murray]

Saw this on CNN website,

It makes you think!!   Tom  KB9WSL

By Lou Dobbs
CNN

Editor's note: Lou Dobbs' commentary appears every Wednesday on CNN.com.

NEW YORK (CNN) -- We're now less than a week away from our midterm 
elections, and Republicans and Democrats are down to their final tens of 
millions of dollars in media buys, their hyperbolic rhetoric all but 
expended and their candidates all but exhausted.

It's amazing what a mere $2.6 billion can buy in a democracy. That's what 
the two parties will have spent in their campaigns leading up to these 
midterm elections, according to the Center for Responsive Politics. And most 
of that money for Democrats and Republicans alike comes from corporate 
America. So what will be the outcome of this election? The only certainty is 
that corporate America will get what it's paid for, and that's more of the 
same.

Whether the Democrats or Republicans take control of the House and Senate, 
corporate America has just bought a license to outsource more middle-class 
jobs to cheap foreign labor markets, to continue unabated so-called free 
trade and the destruction of more manufacturing jobs, and most likely to 
promote amnesty for the 12 million to 20 million illegal aliens living in 
this country.

So, no, I'm not real excited about what some see as a potentially tectonic 
shift in political power in the House of Representatives or U.S. Senate.

While the name of the party in charge may change from Republican to 
Democrat, it's really only a branding issue. And just as my friend James 
Mtume says, it's still the same bird, just a different wing. And believe me, 
middle-class America will still be getting the bird.

Neither party at the national or local level is talking about what to do 
about the education crisis in our public schools. Both parties seem to think 
a 10-year plan to measure the decline of our schools through the No Child 
Left Behind law is an adequate response to what is an outright emergency.

Both parties seem happily content to give their multinational corporate 
masters exactly what they want in the form of so-called free trade, which 
has cost millions of middle-class Americans their jobs to outsourcing and 
off-shoring of manufacturing production to cheap overseas labor markets.

And God forbid we should disturb the orthodoxies of both parties that insist 
that we not secure our borders and ports, despite radical Islamist terrorist 
threats, the multibillion-dollar illegal drug trade and what is nothing less 
than an invasion of illegal aliens into this country.

Yes, I said "country." America really is a nation, but you couldn't convince 
those who lead the Democratic and Republican Parties of that. Both parties 
now see America as nothing more than an economy, a marketplace, and not a 
sovereign nation. They don't see you and me as citizens of this great 
nation; they see us as units of labor, consumers and taxpayers.

Corporate America long ago quit talking about corporate citizenship and 
corporate responsibility, and with both the Democratic and Republican 
Parties as its tools, corporate America wants you and me to forget that we 
are first citizens, and that America is first a nation.

Only 15 percent of eligible voters turned out to cast a ballot in this 
year's primary elections, according to an American University study. Never 
before have so few of us bothered to vote in primary elections. And it's no 
wonder. Our middle class is beginning to get the joke.

Most Americans understand that all the major decisions have already been 
made. It is now clear to all but those who will not see that both political 
parties and their corporate masters have placed our middle class in direct 
competition with the world's cheapest labor, leaving it only a tenuous and 
failing grip on the American Dream.

Until all of us who care about this great nation and the world's greatest 
democracy find the energy and commitment to insist on political choice and 
true representation in Washington, then the very idea of America will remain 
in peril.

Unfortunately, the choices we'll be permitted to make on November 7 will do 
little to mitigate that peril.

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