Written by Citizen Mike   

I am completely terrified by the results of yesterday's election. Is this country is now turning into something so horrible that I must consider going into exile abroad?

It really does appear that our liberty and democracy are coming unraveled and a police state dictatorship controlled by a handful of ultra-rich families and their crony corporations is right around the corner. And that the kind of police state brutality used in Ferguson will spread out, with cops occupying the space formerly occupied by the KKK, but with heavy paramilitary equipment.

I guess this is what it felt like to be approaching retirement in Germany in 1933. The American experiment in democracy is over, the people have chosen a corporate dictatorship and have empowered a cluster of robber baron families to function as real barons who are above the law, and we have agreed to be peasants. Not sure what to do except stop watching or reading the news and withdraw into an enclosed personal life, keep a low profile and hope that this wave of fascism will not directly impact me. I feel sorry for the ethnic minorities who will now be demonized and persecuted.

The Republicans now control both the Senate and the House and many states, too. We can expect Obama to be paralyzed and incapable of getting anything done at all. More tax breaks for the rich, the unborn to be declared legal persons, corporations to gain yet more power over government, pogroms and militarized police and rightwing militia assaults against Black, Hispanic and Immigrant communities, increased limits on the right to vote, denial of global warming and rollback of regulations controlling pollution, and attempts to also roll back Social Security, Medicaid, Medicare, and Obamacare. An end to welfare and food stamps, no more free lunches for poor school children.

Our infrastructure will continue to decay and lack necessary repairs, with more and more wealth transferred to the rich, and the Middle Class driven down into poverty. Schools will be forced to teach nonsense science denying evolution and global warming, and false history that glorifies the US as mystically entitled to rule the world.

At this point I am convinced that Obama was all along the hired employee of corporate interests and his job assignment was to pretend to be progressive and then be a failed president, to discredit progressive politics as unworkable lay the groundwork for a rightwing takeover.

Is there any remedy? I find a little hope in observing that the blue states are contiguous with each other and with Canada, too. So there remains the possibility of a peaceful and orderly schism, to withdraw from the Union and form independent Republics of the Northeast, North Central and West Coast that will preserve our traditional liberty and democracy. And which could then ask to be admitted to the Canadian Federation. This would give Canada our most prosperous and productive territories, an excellent economic platform, and our best universities, too, a very good deal for them.