Wednesday, November 15, 2017

A Blow Out

Tim Keller won the Mayor's race with 62% of the vote, ahem, as I predicted.  It was a blow out brought on by a grassroots get out the vote effort and by a now failing genre of negative political advertising.  At least we can hope this basically Democratic minded city has meted out a message that these horrible right-wing strategies will no longer work.  Dan Lewis drank that Kool-Aid and he got just what he deserved.

The urban areas of this state will always be beacons of light, just as in most other areas of the USA.  The problem lies in the rural areas where economic stagnation and poor education hold sway.  The voters there are suckered by religious, conservative, corporate sponsored hucksterism.  Gerrymandering gives them way more power than they deserve, all enabled by Corporate America's money machine.

We can decry right-wing conservatives all day long, but it is Corporate America that is to blame.  Don't ever forget that.  And in the ABQ's Mayor's race for once they will pay the price.  I am thinking the developers of the Santolina sprawl development on the west side here.  If I were Keller I would give them an appointment for a sit-down discussion, and then send an intern to the meeting.

3 comments:

Proud Dem said...

A big congratulations to Tim Keller on his huge victory! He ran such a brilliant campaign. The energy in the progressive community is amazing, and it's a bad omen, next year, for another Bible thumping, Donald Dump loving, right-wing Republican-Steve "Little Texas" Pierce. He's going to lose badly just as Dan Lewis did.

Anonymous said...

"We can decry right-wing conservatives all day long, but it is Corporate America that is to blame."

That quote from your post rightly and aptly applies to the fact that New Mexico's rural areas, and rural areas nationwide, are what allow people like Trump to win the electoral college vote.

I urge you to also apply it to your previous post in which you talk about how the country is going to hell under the zombie clown king and his pack of howling coyotes.

Corporate America is going to allow Trump only so much slack. It/they won't allow him to fundamentally alter their system. Workers will get enough to keep them coming to work to produce wealth for the wealthy stock holders who own 90 percent of the stock market stock.

The unelected political/foreign policy establishments have their roles internalized as does the media. Changes in the media may mean that things look different, even foreign, but that's just on the surface because Corporate America, remember, is still in charge, and it owns the media.

The media help facilitate the appearance of Roy Moores and Donald Trumps, but these loons only act out on the surface what always exists and stays hidden away in everybody's unconscious. Trump is a product of this system not a cause. Those Trump voters are made of the same thing the rest of us are. The different environment that forms them means they have more of their underbelly showing. Or at least it looks that way to us. The environment that forms us makes us just as evil to them. They think we're clueless or worse.

But please, everyone, relax -- we still have and are going to have the country that Corporate America serves up. Trump won't be allowed to change things in any significant way. He's not passed any legislation. Yesterday a senate committee held a hearing to assess the way the nuclear arsenal is controlled. The same forces that brought us to here are still there.

Our task is the same as ever, to find a way to control the corporations instead of them controlling our country. I imagine many of your readers believe the Democratic Party is the way to go. It shields us from the worst of it. Yes, but less and less so all the time, as they cash in on their $400,000 Wall Street speeches and whatnot.

That change in the Democrats has taken place so gradually that people haven't noticed. And Republicans have gotten worse so Democrats seem the relatively worker friendly ones. Right. They invariably vote for the imperial wars and the tax cuts and the cuts to social services. They were going to let this current tax bill sail through until the politically volatile Obamacare subsidy was thrown into the mix. Our NM senator Democrats both voted for the $80 billion increase to the $700 billion annual military budget, and knew -- knew for a fact -- that Republicans will come calling for social program cuts to offset the revenue imbalances.

I, and more and more people, think it's time to bypass the Democrats and handle things ourselves, like we always should have. Once we had unions to express our will for us but no more. We just need to find another way to organize and express our power. That's how we get the country we, not Corporate America, wants.

Anonymous said...

The Guardian's Bruce Bartlett apparently read my comment and was inspired to write a column explaining how Republicans pull it off over and over - cut taxes, blame the resulting deficit on the Democrats and force them to cut social programs.

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/nov/20/republican-tax-cuts-democrats

The question remains whether Democrats are stupid or whether they go along with the charade to keep the money flowing into their campaign coffers from the billionaire donors they court and depend on.