What Remains After the Balloons are Gone

AT LEAST THE Democrats know how to put on a show, which is more than you can say for the Republicans.

Tonight will include Scarlett Johansson and Kerry Washington, as well as Natalie Portman and Eva Longoria.

Meanwhile, below the stagecraft remains the same elite political system that is strangling fairness and access for all.

This year there will be more opportunities to vote for candidates outside the big two than I’ve seen in a long time, even in northern Virginia, the belly of the Beltway.

Then there is the anger beyond the big two parties.

Matt Stoller channels it today. The argument Stoller is making is set on a warning: Don’t let the conventions distract you from the real lesson of 2012: America is becoming increasingly undemocratic.

Physically, at the convention, a powerful national security apparatus is in place to kettle and intimidate protesters, keeping them to their free speech zones. Obama himself was nominated by Bill Clinton, a politician so corrupt that he made over $80 million in just 10 years in speaking fees from groups with policy interests before the government he ran, and whose State Department his spouse now runs. And on the floor of the convention, a plank demanded by the Israel lobby was inserted into the Democratic Party platform over the objections of the delegates, in a rank display of internal autocracy. …

[...] Senator Dick Durbin has been telling reporters that the Obama administration is going to give the entitlement gutting Simpson-Bowles budget framework another try if he wins, and close Obama advisors are looking for a grand bargain on taxes and entitlement reform. Obama already tried to raise the Medicare eligibility age and cut Social Security benefits during the debt ceiling negotiations. Meanwhile, corporate titans and Democratic elites like Andy Stern and Steny Hoyer are already gathering to put this framework into place in the post-election environment, regardless of who wins. – What are we cheering for?

The happy, peppy video set against Stoller’s rant not only seems discordant, but from another world.

That’s the issue with politics today. There is the establishment and the elites who sustain it, with everyone else living another reality, simmering in an America where upward mobility is being deleted as a possible path for most.

When not even Democrats will stand up for a living wage beside unions who make it possible, you know we’re all in a lot of trouble.

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