Change you can believe that Republicans will block

As the U.S Republican party continues to hamstring their country’s ability to function, right-wing pundits and old-boy conservative are no doubt attending their luxury parties and puffing on cigars at the expense of the unemployed and poor. With a full out assault on U.S democratic institutions, Republican senators are determined to prevent their elected President from passing any legislation all – even that which that the majority of polled Americans support.

Let me be quite clear: I am no adoring fan of Barak Obama. My issue is with the governing system itself. In my estimation, Obama – like every other politician in the economically dominant regions of world – is primarily a top level manager within the sprawling corporate infrastructure that props up the broken machinery called democracy. Obama’s main job is produce effective public rhetoric while brokering deals between wealthy elites and the special interests they embody.

This is not to say I think his intentions are completely insidious, because I think he actually believes in the systems he manages, and he indeed wants to work within established parameters to improve the lives of Americans. But history and the state of the world as it is suggests that he is awfully wrong.

Rather, what I want to highlight here is just how broken the U.S government is. What we see at work there is a two party system full of self-interested politikers, waging childish verbal and strategic wars against each other in the Senate and throughout the system. Divided and debilitated these two camps retreat into ideological backwardness while working to maintain the established order of power and influence. Smear campaigns, misinformation and political posturing render policy innovation and legislative progress impossible.

Prime example: The shockingly destructive filibusters by current Republican regime. In the last U.S Congress, the Republican minority more than doubled the previous record for filibusters, and they are currently on a pace to challenge or surpass this absurd obstruction of the democratic process this time around. How is it possible for this party, and these politicians to even pretend that they are working for the American people when they are completely grinding the governance mechanisms to a halt? Truly, I don’t understand how the grass-roots conservative faithful allow their representatives to get away with this dismantling of effective government?

Constitutional lawyers and political scientists everywhere are flabbergasted the level partisan politics deployed by the Republicans. It is simply unprecedented that a party refuses to allow an elected president to do his job.

This latest bit of democratic obstruction being staged by Senate conservatives, done in the name of limiting federal spending, is going to end up costing cash-strapped states millions of dollars as well as potentially causing millions of workers to lose their unemployment benefits. At this very moment Sen. Jim Bunning, R-Ky., continues to block an extension of federal unemployment insurance benefits that are due to expire this weekend. Sen. Bunning’s filibuster will result in at least 400,000 people nationwide going without unemployment benefits this month - deepening the despair among the working calls and impoverished throughout the U.S [source] .

Millions more could lose employment support in the next few weeks if Congress doesn’t return to functioning, according to the U.S Department of Labor. The agency also estimated that 500,000 Americans will lose access to the program that allows the jobless to buy health insurance through their former employer, with the government paying 65 percent of the cost. Jim and his Republic business partners will effectively ensure that people barely existing at bottom 10% of the economic system will go without income support and have no access to healthcare. This is at the same time that studies show there are five unemployed Americans today for every job opening in the current economy. People are not unemployed because of choice [source]. All this because Jim and the Republicans doesn’t want the current administration to increase the deficit???

Ever afraid of looking like radicals, Congressional Democrats have not even truly challenged Bunning, except to briefly point out the hypocrisy of his own political record of repeatedly voting to expand the deficit when it came to wars, and tax cuts to the wealthy – and while fighting relentlessly to provide government handouts to huge drug companies. This is all on official record people, look it up.

As a result of Bunning’s political posturing the Senate has adjourned until Monday, with no votes scheduled until Tuesday. The results of this blockage in governance means that states will now start cutting off all sorts of payments to about 5 million people this weekend according to the National Association of State Workforce Agencies.

Such actions will force the most disadvantaged families in America to deal with addition domestic stressors that will no doubt reverberate through the healthcare, legal and penal systems, with more and more people losing their homes, becoming sick, medicated and/or turning to alternative and sometimes criminal economic activities in order to survive. The cost that this particular Republican stunt to taxpayers and the economy will very quickly cascade into the hundreds of millions. It seems the old regime of business and banking control is holding for now.

If these events and the current state of U.S governmental affairs doesn’t strike the average American as profoundly disturbing and pathologically disruptive I honestly don’t know what would?