USA terrain in the 21st century

Our World and welcome to it.

This photo is not exactly contingent with this post. I just thought it was a cool photo to add to my blog. Not sure who reads this blog, but it looks like my profile has been checked out 156 times, so somebody must be giving it a cursory glance. Well, sometimes I get lazy about posting. Sometimes just doing some of the mundane things you do during a day, is plenty enough to fill up one's time.

I was reading up on some Delay commentary , I think at Huffington Post, and came across the article at a gasp' socialist' web site.
Entitled: The resignation of Tom DeLay and the crisis of the US two-party system. By Patrick Martin, --- 7 April 2006.
It gets interesting for me at this paragraph:

"The DeLay resignation was followed by an outpouring of empty moralizing from top Democrats and Republicans, as well as the media, and suggestions that his departure marked the end of an era, bringing a halt to the period when well-heeled corporate lobbyists obtained seats at the legislative table in return for lavish gifts and campaign contributions. In many instances, lobbyists literally wrote the legislation that was then introduced by their congressional front-men."

Then it continues with:

"Corporate money has always called the shots in Washington, but the past quarter-century has seen a qualitative intensification of this process and the rise to power of a political underworld—thuggish operatives who employ vast sums of money and unscrupulous conspiratorial methods, bolstered by a servile and compliant media, to do the bidding of the super-rich.

The social roots of this phenomenon can be discerned by asking the elementary political question: who benefits? The past 25 years have seen a massive transfer of wealth from the vast majority of the American people—those who must work for a living—into the pockets of an already moneyed elite. The figures are by now well-established: in 1979, the top one percent owned about 20 percent of the national wealth; by 2004, that figure had more than doubled. The real incomes of most Americans have stagnated, while the incomes of corporate CEOs and the ruling elite have rocketed upwards.

This process has continued under Republican and Democratic presidents and Republican and Democratic Congresses, in recession and economic upswing, in war and peace. It is the fundamental socio-economic fact of modern America, although it is generally disregarded or mystified in the commentaries of the corporate-controlled media."

Furthermore the writer adds:

"Corruption is not an accidental or external aspect of this process, but rather lies at its very heart. The entire society, including its political institutions, is poisoned by the relentless drive to accumulate ever-greater private wealth in the hands of a narrow, privileged stratum.

Billionaires, of course, do not generally stoop to engage in congressional committee staff-work or legislative vote-counting. For this they employ political operatives, largely drawn from the more unscrupulous and backward sections of the middle class. (DeLay was the proprietor of a small pesticide distribution business before launching his political career.)

It is not surprising that those who choose to make their political career by assisting the wealthiest in society to grow even wealthier do not represent the highest type of human material. The occupation of providing ideological justifications for personal enrichment necessarily encourages the basest desires for profiteering and self-dealing at public expense. DeLay, Abramoff & Co. are not an aberration, but the logical outcome of the increasingly reckless and criminal plundering of the United States by the corporate elite and its two political parties."

I found this at WSWS . I don't necessarily subscribe to everything he says here, but, I think many ordinary Americans sense this is what has been going on. At some point the middle and working classes of this country are going to be hollowed out shells of their former selves, and the poltics of this country will get very strange. Even stranger than they are now.
Selah.