What Main Stream Media Political Analysts Won't Tell You On Election Night

In an election year with millions of Americans out of work and the national economy growing at only a 2 percent annual growth rate, the assumed winners of the upcoming 2010 election are posed to do nothing to create the millions of jobs needed for a sustained and robust economic recovery. Sorry to burst your bubble, but for all you republican party cheerleaders, here are some sobering facts to consider.

According to a recent Associated Press article,

a growth rate of 5 percent or higher is needed to put a major dent in the nation's 9.6 percent unemployment rate. Economists say it takes GDP growth of 3 percent a year just to keep the unemployment rate from rising as more Americans reach working age and immigrants enter the country. It would take 2 additional percentage points of growth for a year to reduce the unemployment rate by 1 point.
"To really get 'Morning in America' and get people feeling like jobs are really coming back, I would want to see something close to 5 percent" annual economic growth, says economist Josh Bivens of the Economic Policy Institute, referring to the iconic 1984 Reagan re-election ad.

That isn't likely to happen soon. Macroeconomic Advisers doesn't expect the labor market to recover all the lost jobs until at least 2013. Other economists say it could be 2018 or longer.

The government reported Friday that the nation's gross domestic product, the broadest measure of goods and services produced, grew at an annual rate of 2 percent from July through September. GDP had risen at an annual rate of 1.7 percent in the second quarter.

Just as democrats were unable to make the politically difficult choices such as cutting the defense budget and ending the costly military expenditures associated with the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and redirecting those resources to rebuild America’s crumbling infrastructure, the incoming republican leadership will also be unable to make the needed cuts to the Pentagon’s always growing budget or end the military occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan. Instead, the leaders of the Republican Party will be primarily concerned with repealing back the legislation that threatened the financial interests of people in the medical insurance and financial services industries who have donated generously to republican candidates throughout the year. As money and wealth in America have long enjoyed the upper hand in American politics, anyone thinking that republican candidates have the best interests of what is left of middle class Americans are completely naïve how the American political process works.

Compared to other democratic countries, the United States is ranked 18th in the world for the quality of its form of government and the political participation of its citizens. Ranking lower than Denmark, Sweden, Spain, France, Switzerland, and Finland as well as Germany, Austria and America’s northern neighbor Canada, the United States does not even rank among the top 15 countries in the world for democracy. For a country that has the presumptuous belief that they are a country acting as a moral compass to the world or a light on top of a hill, the scientific data presented by the Economist Magazine’s Democracy Index definitively crushes that arrogant and egotistical notion. With cash raining down, and unnamed corporate entities seizing the democratic day, in what the American media calls “fundraising”, perhaps one of the most important factors contributing to America’s inferior global ranking in the quality of its democracy, is the ever increasing amount and influence of money in the American political process.

According to the Washington Post,

House and Senate candidates have already shattered fundraising records for a midterm election and are on their way to surpassing $2 billion in spending for the first time during a mid-term election.

That breaks down to about $4 million for every congressional seat up for grabs in 2010, but that figure doesn’t include the approximately $400 million being raised by what the American main stream press calls “outside interest groups.” Those are some pretty amazing figures even in a time during a healthy economy. In a time when millions of people are unemployed and Americans are being forced out of their foreclosed homes, the figures are perhaps the most distressing aspect

With the main stream press and republican party operatives portraying the upcoming mid term election as a referendum on Barack Obama, a more astute and accurate analysis of the upcoming election is the role of money in the American political process and the continuing power of the corporate political complex.

Unlike nearly all the Americans who have been fooled, deceived, and mislead during this mid-term election with smoke and mirror political rhetoric, this political analyst understands that the incoming republican majority cares more carrying out the wishes of their wealthy donors in the financial and medical industries in which some democrats challenged in 2009, than they do about moving the country forward or helping putting the millions of Americans who are out of work find a job.

Until there is serious campaign finance reform and money is taken out of politics, more Americans participate in the political process, and politicians stand up to the power of the vested and powerful interests associated with the Pentagon and defense corporations, the demise of America will continue unabated.