Written by William DeSeta   

Well, the American people have spoken, at least the ones who count, because if you don’t vote you don’t count, have nothing to say about the results and belong in a dictatorship where your lack of interest is matched by someone’s lust for power.

It was an interesting election with results that while not earth shattering, were somewhat surprising when one considers that the majority voted against their stated interest. Yeah, that’s right. They did. Most of the voters interviewed before and after the election said that the things that bothered them most were gridlock in Washington, the decline of the middle class and the inability of low-income labor to live on their paychecks.

So, I’m looking at the results of the election and there’s no way any of those complaints are going to be solved or even addressed. Most people, it is commonly believed, vote in their best interests but I’ll be damned if I can figure out how people who want more jobs and higher wages voted for Scot Walker, one of the most avowed enemies of labor in the nation. Or, how Joanie Ernst, an avowed opponent of any immigration bill, ever got elected in a state that depends on low cost farm labor.

The country which has stated emphatically that it hates the gridlock that has infected congress, voted very strongly for the people who have caused that gridlock. It’s really hard to understand. Are the American people, that minority who voted anyway, really as dumb as they seem? Or is something else in play here, something that those, who are shocked by this election result are missing, big time?

The biggest complaint that voters brought to the polls was the failure of government to work the way it’s supposed to. Well, folks, it ain’t gonna work any better now, and you can take that to the bank. Congress is responsible for appointing or clearing over 800 people to fill government jobs. More than half of those jobs are currently empty. Having half the labor force missing doesn’t get any job done better, but the Republicans who control the House just don’t give a damn.

Mitch McConnell couldn’t keep Obama from getting re-elected but he sure has tried to sabotage his years in office. Mitch didn’t care that he as also sabotaging the country, as long as Obama didn’t get any style points while Mitch was around playing ISIS. That’s right. That’s what I said, because in the last eight years Mitch McConnell has done a hell of a lot more harm to this country that ISIS ever thought to do and now he’s the Majority Leader in the Senate. Welcome to Somolia.

The interesting thing is that the people who need good government most didn’t turn out to try and effect it Young people, blacks and Hispanics were visibly missing and It’s those people who need most to get rid of the GOP. So if you didn’t vote you get what you earned. Five states, four of them red, voted for increased minimum wage. The problem is that they are all states controlled by politicians who make their living from the lobbyists not the people, and it’s going to be a hard road to actually get those wage hikes into law. The Republicans are looking to give the Koch’s a tax cut not the people a wage hike. You can’t do both so who do you think is going to get what they want?

The biggest problem with our government right now is that it has become a group of professional politicians. This is what they do for a living and their only interest is in keeping their jobs not in servicing their constituents. One would think that servicing their constituents was the way they would keep those jobs but that doesn’t seem to be true. Sucking up to big money’s interests and getting those campaign donations is what really works and when it doesn’t, when these slackers are finally thrown out of office, working for the lobby’s that helped the big money to stay big, is an even better job than being a congressman.

Congress was originally made up of volunteers, men who stopped what they were doing and came to Washington because they cared about what the government did. That, of course, is no longer practical. If we still had that system we would have only rich men in congress, men who could afford to take a couple of years off from work and that would mean that humanity being what it is, only the needs of the rich would be met. But that does sound like what’s going on now, doesn’t it? I mean according to published statistics over half of the people in congress are millionaires.

The reality is, that what we have now, is definitely about making the rich richer because all of our politicians are doing this for a living and so they must spend much of their time raising money and making deals that will get them re-elected. The result of that is that the people are getting screwed. Their needs aren’t coming close to being met.

Anyone with the intelligence level of a nat, understands that there are certain programs that must be addressed by congress simply because the country needs them or some version of them to be solved. Among them are immigration, tax reform, a raise in the minimum wage, a crumbling infrastructure, the environment, runaway campaign funding, affordable housing, the extension of Obamacare to cover every person in the country, an overhaul of our entire national security system, gerrymandering, the suppression of the voter system and the development of a national foreign policy. There are many who will look at this list as a liberal agenda and maybe it is, but every problem on it has national and international implications. They are, cumulatively the business of the nation and none of them are being addressed by what we laughingly call the congress.

One of the ways to extract the professional politician out of the government is to limit their ability to make it a lifetime profession. If you can only serve in the senate for 6 years and in the house for four or six then you have to be able to do something else before and after, unless, of course, you find suicide appealing. There has been a great deal of ambivalence about term limits in the past and with good reason. When we do find congressmen with good ideas and the ability to implement them, it’s hard to let them go.

Unfortunately those men and women are getting harder and herder to find, despite the business of government getting more and more complicated and the need for experienced people in it more important. So like everything else that is intelligently solved, we must find a balance, a place where the need for experience is balanced with the need for non-professional legislators in government.

The people who voted didn’t vote for the Republicans because they loved all the Republican policies. Many of them voted GOP because the Democrats who ran were mushy and had no definite program. The Republicans had a definite program- Obama is wrong, everything that he has done is wrong- we will stop him from doing anything else that will hurt you. Sure it’s bullshit but they sold it hard and the Democrats who were running and lost did so by abandoning the President and looking like what they are, a bunch of losers.

Scott Walker, beat a millionaire industrialist, Mary Burke in Wisconsin. That’s the same Scott Walker who thinks $7.25 an hour is a living wage. I’d like to see ole Scotty try to live on $7.25. Sam Browback in Kansas gave huge tax cuts to the rich, still believing in the infamous lie that is the trickle down economic theory. As predicted, he bankrupted the state but his mushy opponent Paul Davis didn’t even have the stones to say that he would repeal those tax cuts. He deserved to lose. Down in Kentucky the loser who saw his only plan, the unseating of the President go down to defeat twice, ran against a woman who wouldn’t admit that she had voted for Obama the two times McConnell tried to beat him. She’s a Democrat for Christ’s sake, who else would she have voted for?

The Republicans won this election because they thinned the herd of most of the dumb clowns who lost last time and vetted their candidates. The Democrats didn’t and they ended up with a bunch of cowardly wimps, who took defeat in stride. None of them had the stones to stand up on their hind legs and tell the voters what they believed. Instead they told the voters what they hoped the voters believed and they got the living shit kicked out of them. In other words, they got what they deserved.