Trollblog looks wistfully back at the Congressional elections of ’36:
We’re headed into The Second Great Depression. Almost no one in our present political establishment has any clue as to what’s happening or what to do about it. Most of them are bought and paid for, and the vast majority are jellified lackeys who are incapable of any initiative on a topic more substantial than earmarks and constituent service.
Our political elite is offering us two choices. Obama, Summers, and the machine Democrats propose that we give finance almost everything it asks for, wait for things somehow to get better, and start thinking about squeezing the money out of Social Security and “entitlements†somewhere down the line. Meanwhile the Republicans and Blue Dogs are hoping for Obama to fail so that they can take over and institute “Hooverist†austerity measures immediately. (These are really Mellonist measures: Liquidate labor, liquidate stocks, liquidate the farmers, liquidate real estate…. purge the rottenness.)
You’re asking yourself: “Does Emerson really believe that a Communist or a thuggish populist demagogue would better serve the American people than the actual Congressman I do have?â€
Yes, that’s exactly what I’m saying. 10-to-1 your Congressman is worthless.
What I see locally is that even most of the supposed leftists have internalised the neoliberal consensus of the past thirty years regardless of whether they agree with or not, hence now this consensus reality is shown to be false they’re clueless what to do. The same people who bought into privatisation are still in power and they’re fundamentally unable to solve this crisis because they cannot think outside of this outmoded consensus.