Obama Dragging His Party Down to Defeat

The so-called "midterm elections" aren't going well for the Democratic Party. This is largely down to Barack Obama, who is deeply despised by a large segment of the U.S. population. (Although mostly for the wrong reasons- namely race, the insane delusion that he's a "socialist," and holding him responsible for something he has almost no control over- the economy of the U.S. The parts of the national government that DO greatly influence the economy are Congress, which controls fiscal policy, that is, spending, and the Federal Reserve, which controls monetary policy- interest rates and the money supply. The continued economic doldrums of the U.S. are due to its structural nature. It is arranged to suck up wealth to a tiny sliver of the population at the apex of the socio-economic pyramid. It also refuses to invest in infrastructure, instead preferring to spend about as much on its military as the rest of the world combined. And it has a grotesque, and grotesquely expensive, medical industry.)

There are good reasons to hate Obama. His massive assaults on civil liberties and human rights make him one of the most destructive U.S. presidents in history in this regard. And of course he is an imperialist, as all U.S. presidents are required to be. And a servant of the corporate oligarchy, again a job requirement. But this isn't why he's heartily disliked, even though it should be.

Many whites who were tricked into voting for him have been disappointed or disillusioned. They were stupid dupes in the first place (although even intelligent people like Cornel West were taken in, and West got to interrogate him for 6 hours!). Blacks however, based on pigmentation loyalty, are still devoted to him. But of course Obama isn't running.

In midterm elections, the president's party almost always loses House seats. That looks to be true this year too. In addition, the Democrats will probably lose control of the Senate.

In the 2012 election, more people voted for Democratic House members than for Republican ones, by over a million votes. Yet the Republicans gained a large majority in the House because they controlled a number of state legislatures and gerrymandered the Congressional districts, packing Democratic votes into as few districts as possible and creating lots of districts with just enough Republicans to control the district. This is perfectly legal in the U.S., as the Supreme Court has held. (Yet this supremely-conceited nation insists it's the World's Greatest Democracy, the Best Democracy There is.)

If Americans truly wanted change, they had several chances to vote for Ralph Nader, for example. There is also a Green Party here, kept invisible by the media and kept out of office by the winner-take-all U.S. electoral system. There is no proportional representation in the U.S. Thus millions of Americans who favor the Greens, or socialism, are totally unrepresented in Congress and in most state legislatures also. The two party dictatorship forces people into a system in which meaningful change is now virtually impossible.

An explanation of the midterm elections for my overseas readers. They're called "midterm" because they occur midway in the 4 year presidential terms. The U.S. Congress has two chambers, the Senate and the House of Representatives. Each of the 50 states gets two Senators, a profoundly undemocratic system that means California, with 38 million people (as of 2012) has the same weight in the Senate as Wyoming (land of Dick Cheney), which has a mere 576 thousand. In other words, one Wyoming person is worth 66 Californians. PUtting it another way,the 22 least populous U.S. states have about the same population as California. Those states have 44 U.S. Senators- almost half the 100 total- and California has 2.

The other chamber, the House, has 435 members, and each Congressional district has roughly 700,000 people. So Wyoming only has one Representative.Bills become laws only when both chambers vote for them and the president signs them. (If the president vetoes a law, it takes a second vote in favor by two-thirds of the members of both chambers to override him.)

Senators serve 6 year terms, Representatives (the House members) serve 2 years. So every two years, the entire House of Representatives is up for reelection (like this year) and one-third of the Senators are.