I've seen some pretty sad faces in my lifetime (what with nine stays in various and sundried mental institutions), but none more sad than those at the table where the local Republicans gather to drink coffee, congregate, socialize, and make fun of my politics. You'd a' thunk it was they day after JFK was assassinated, maybe worse. You'd a' maybe thunk the day was 9-12-2001.
One of the later arrivals could not hide his anger. "Everybody better find a second job," he said, with anger, resignation, and despair in his voice.
"Well," quips I, "my condidate (Jill Stein - Green Party) did not win either."
My dream scenario all the long was Obama by a wipeout in the electoral college, and Romney by a lot in the general. What better way to rid this land of the winner take all electoral college?
As I left, I suggested that everybody make predictions about how things will be four years hence.
More on this later.
Jeez, Lew-ease! What the hell is gonna be different?
My financial consulting friend Nancy Effert advised me on Monday that they had two entirely different investment strategies, depending on who was elected. In the event of an Obama election, their assumption was that the market would take a dive. She didn't sayhow much, just that it would. In the event of a Romney victory (not the moral kind where he would have won the popular vote and lost in the electoral college), her company's strategy would have been based on a relatively gentle uptick of the market.
Guys, gals, REALLY, what is gonna be different?
God's Own Party still controls the House of Representatives, and they can block legislation at will for the next two years running.
I think people are mostly mad because they believe Obama is going to raise their taxes. WELL, fer Chris-sakes, he SHOULD. Those two (major, known, and fully documented) unfunded wars of choice we been waging on the civilians of Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, plus the 120 or so other covert wars the CIA has been waging in other countries, well, the bill is coming due. The medical and mental health care costs for the troops (some of whom have been deployed five and even six times) are mounting. The U.S. government is not taking in enough money.
What I hope is that Obama puts some REAL pain on the large international corporations that donated like drunken sailors on shore leave to the Republican Party and stops giving them all those fricken tax breaks, to the extent that they are paying the smallest share of Federal Income Taxes that they have paid since the 1950's.
I think a lot of hard-core Republicans started to take the debates seriously, as if the debates were going to change the minds of voters. Good God in Heaven above. If you hadn't decided who you wanted to be President of the United States before the debates started, you had to be REALLY inastute; you had to have forgotten what happens when we elect Republicans who believe that "Government is NOT the solution to the problems; government IS the problem!" If you really believe THAT is the situation, then who in the hell ought to sensibly WANT you to be running the government?
Obama will manage to accomplish pretty even more of the Republican agenda than Romney would have ever dreamed of - he will continue to reduce social benefits, increase defense spending, and be a shameless corporate whore to Goldman Sachs and the investment banking community, the Insurance industry, and the real estate interests. Unfettered, the FIRE sector will generate ever more and ever bigger bubbles that will go POP, and be "too big to fail, ergo, we must bail," and the CORPTOCRACY WINS (as it seems they always do).
The Ccorporate Welfare State will continue making bail outs (the next big bubble to explode, will be -- the housing market AGAIN. And THAT would happen REGARDLESS of who held the office of POTUS.
