Meet The New Boss, Same As The Old Boss

It will still be very surprising to me if Democrats really are able to make any great sea change to the political landscape on November 7. Wealthy and powerful business interests simply will not give up much political power that easily. The Bush White House and the Republican control of Congress are little more than an oligarchy form of big business interests who rule over Americans as this form of government. They don't really believe in free elections in which their power is at stake.

Republicans still have plenty of advantages to blunt any strong Democratic gains on Tuesday. New polls suggest a late surge by Republicans where now the Senate control looks far out of the question for the Democrats, and even the House could be threatened as well. Republicans have far better "get out the vote" efforts, spent more corporate money on ads than Democrats, and a full 91% of their ads were character assasination attempts on Democrats or other negative attacks.

Big corporations such as General Electric which own NBC created the phony John Kerry incident last week by deliberately taking the White House line that Kerry attacked the intelligence of U.S. troops instead of George Bush which Kerry obviously intended. Big corporate owned news doesn't want to pay increased taxes or lose tax breaks, so has a huge financial stake in driving down any Democratic hopes.

And many Republicans are misguided folks, self -convinced while waving their "made-in-China", American flags that Democrats are antiAmerican or traitors of some sort, blind to all their own lies or absurd greedy self-serving probig business hypocrisy. Many Republicans still don't seem to realize that Bush's speeches are little more than dirt ignorant lies and falsehoods about Iraq, the War On Terror or taxes.

Progressives shouldn't really expect too much on November 7, and they won't be disappointed. Millions have been spent by big corporations to continue to get their way in Congress and favortism from the Bush White House. These people just don't give up power very easily. Americans are not very class concious, and this is no real electoral revolt of the masses to greatly change the government, but a tightly controlled environment in which big corporations are able to spent enough money to get their desired results. They have no doubt been able to get a pretty favorable final outcome based on the volume of false and misleading character attack ads that they purchased this year. The system is so rigged and biased towards big corporate dominance, and only an illusion of a real democracy. Tuesday's results will very likely mirror my concerns.

On Wednesday, political pundits will likely blame John Kerry, Democratic turnout or some other Democratic factor for their weaker than anticipated showing on Tuesday. But the truth is that they never really had a real chance on a truly fair playing field.