The ease with which the tea party was infiltrated and manipulated by the Republican establishment and the speed with which Occupy Wall Street is being taken over by the Democratic establishment shows that substantive change will never be accomplished through public demonstrations and the threat of numbers at the ballot box.
Most Americans opposed TARP. They saw no reason to use taxpayer money for bailing out the very financial institutions that had been parasitically feeding off them for decades. But America is not a democracy. It is no longer even a representative democracy. The banking bailout, the GSE bailout and the subsequent automotive bailout were all rammed down the unwilling throats of the American public by the Goldman-controlled Treasury Department with the help of the Bush administration and congressional Democrats. It was rather like a doctor forcing a rape victim to pay for her own chemotherapy because it would benefit her rapist.
Bipartisan support for the bailout made it clear to all and sundry that at the end of the day, the supposed divide between the Republican and Democratic parties is an imaginary one. Republicans and Democrats are nothing more than a unitary bank party.
But Americans are not as helpless as most of them feel right now. While it is true that their elected “representatives” ignore the limits set by the U.S. Constitution, pay only lip service to the will of the people and have rigged the electoral system so that in some years there is less turnover in the Senate than in the British House of Lords, what the people lack in political power they still retain in economic power, particularly in times of economic contraction.
Political power is easily suborned and misdirected, particularly in a purported democracy with near universal suffrage. Wave a bloody flag or threaten the social order and Republicans will fall readily into line. Threaten to cut the budgets of the myriad of government agencies funding various special interest groups or make noise about “going back to the fifties” and Democrats will do the same. The ease with which the tea party was infiltrated and manipulated by the Republican establishment and the speed with which Occupy Wall Street is being taken over by the Democratic establishment shows that substantive change will never be accomplished through public demonstrations and the threat of numbers at the ballot box.
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