TomDispatch: Pentagon Lovers and Welfare Queens

Although the Internet has been flooded with political analysis of the recent mid term election, perhaps one of the most perceptive and intelligent article on the recent mid-term election comes from the blog TomDispatch entitled, Pentagon Lovers and Welfare Queens.

As a self professed blog claiming to be an antidote to the main stream press, the recent article by the blog’s creator, Tom Engelhardt, is a good article explaining how wealth, money, and the ever growing political power of the Pentagon is undermining American democracy. Taking the reader along on a journey of post campaigns reflections since his first vote in 1968, the article by Tom Engelhardt is a painful reminder how many times average hard working middle class Americans have voted against their own best interests and have been deceived by the politicians they have supported at the ballot box.

The beginning of the now habitual betrayal of American voters over the last half century is reflected in Tom Engelhardt’s article as he review his voting record beginning with the 1964 Presidential election between Lyndon B. Johnson and Barry Goldwater, a Republican extremist and warmonger. As Engelhardt writes,

In memory, I feel as if I voted in it, though I couldn’t have since the voting age was then 21, and I was only 20. Nonetheless, I all but put my X beside the “peace candidate” of that moment, Lyndon B. Johnson, who had, in such an untimely manner, inherited the Oval Office and a war in Vietnam.

Not long after his inauguration, however, Johnson launched Operation Rolling Thunder, the bombing of North Vietnam. It had been planned before the election, but was kept suitably under wraps while Goldwater was being portrayed as a man intent on getting American boys killed in Asia and maybe nuking the planet as well.

Four years later, with half a million U.S. troops in South Vietnam and the war reaching conflagration status, I was “mad as hell and not going to take this any more” -- and that was years before Paddy Chayefsky penned those words for the film Network. I was at least as mad as any present-day Tea Partier and one heck of a lot younger.

Understanding the growing political influence and power of the military inside the executive branch in 1964, the claim by Engelhardt that Lyndon Johnson and his national security advisors had planned Operation Rolling Thunder before the election is totally reasonable.

Although the recent article by Engelhardt briefly mentions the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980, the phrase welfare queens is a reference to the how both political parties give government handouts to wealthy financial institutions whenever they get in financial trouble. Long time blog readers will remember that Il Principe discussed this is a blog posting in which the Grand Prince published a list from the most recent Kevin Phillips book, Bad Money: Reckless Finance, Failed Politics and the Global Crisis of American Capitalism. The list complied by Phillip’s is a prime example of how both political parties in America have provided financial bailouts by the Federal government with American tax dollars between 1980 and 2000.

As Engelhardt writes in his recent article,

between 1980 and 2005, “more than 80% of total increase in Americans' income went to the top 1%” of Americans in terms of wealth, and today that 1% controls 24% of the nation’s income. Or put another way, after three decades of ”trickle-down” economics, what’s gone up are the bank accounts of the rich.

In 2009, for instance, as Americans generally scrambled and suffered, lost jobs, watched pensions, IRAs, or savings shrink and houses go into foreclosure, millionaires actually increased. According to the latest figures, the combined wealth of the 400 richest Americans (all billionaires) has risen by 8% this year, even as, in the second quarter of 2010, the net worth of American households plunged 2.8%.

Jumping ahead to the 2000 campaign and the election of George W. Bush by the Supreme Court, and then the re-election of the War Criminal in Chief in 2004, it is understandable why Engelhardt subtitled his recent article, Ballot Box Blues- The Most Dispiriting Election of a Lifetime (Mine). With a large amount of the money spent in the most recent election cycle coming from the richest five percent of Americans who have seen their wealth increase by eight percent, while at the same time millions of Americans are unemployed and senior citizens are denied a COLA increase for 2011, it is understandable why political analysts like Tom Engelhardt are disheartened with the recent election results.

While most of the media failed in epic proportions to discuss the amount of money being spent on the 2010 mid-term election, independent blogs like TomDispatch have the moral fortitude to write about one of the most under reported stories of the current Great Recession.

Unlike mainstream media outlets that rely on advertising dollars for operating income, independent blogs like TomDispatch and Opinione are not worried about upsetting corporations or wealthy individuals. Like a political version of Consumer Reports, independent blogs are indeed An Antidote to the Mainstream Media.