If one political party's standard-bearer for president wrote off half
of the electorate as people who would never vote for them, and had a
message that only appealed to and was catered specifically toward only 1
percent of the voting public, why should anyone take that party or that
candidate seriously enough for them to have a shot at winning?
It's understandable that Mitt Romney wrote off half of the electorate
because he and his friends in the American corporatocracy simply speak
entirely different languages. Even though the nation's
median income,
which is already a statistic skewed far higher than normal by outliers
at the top, is only $50,000. But according to Romney, a household making
a quarter of a million dollars a year, which only 2 percent of
households make, is "
middle class." And $360,000 for speaking fees, which is greater than six median -ncome families make per year, combined, is apparently
not a lot of money.
His assertion that the 47 percent of Americans who pay no income tax are government moochers
applies to a wide swath of Americans.
This includes working families with children making anywhere from
$30,000 to more than $50,000 who pay negative federal income tax rates
thanks to programs like the Child Tax Credit and the Earned Income Tax
Credit. Besides, Romney himself
benefited
from a $10 million bailout at Bain Capital. For a family of three on
welfare to receive as much help from Uncle Sam as Mitt Romney, they'd
have to be on welfare
for 328 years.
For those still convinced that the GOP should still be a major party,
Romney's gaffes notwithstanding, take a look at how the Republicans in
the House of Representatives have voted over the last few years,
particularly for the budgets they've proposed and endorsed. While they
have no problem
voting down
tax cuts for middle class households (those making less than $250,000 a
year), Republicans have steadfastly endorsed cutting taxes for the top 1
percent to even lower levels in their
official budget proposal. That same budget makes
the bulk of its cuts
from social programs that are primarily there to benefit the middle
class and the poor. The House Republican budget even makes part of its
$4 trillion in cuts by ending federal funding for school lunch programs,
meaning
280,000 poor kids would have less to eat, all so millionaires can have even bigger tax cuts.
Not to be outdone, Senate Republicans
unanimously voted down
a bill that would stop taxpayer subsidies for corporations that fired
American workers and shipped their jobs overseas. They voted down
assistance for
homeless female veterans, and even just recently voted down a bill that would have provided jobs to
unemployed veterans.
The American Jobs Act, which would have created around two million new
jobs for teachers, first responders and construction workers across the
US, was
unanimously rejected by Senate Republicans around this time last year. The reason? To pay for all of those new jobs, taxes on millionaires would have gone up by
a few percentage points.
Anyone who legitimately believes the Republican Party is there to serve
anyone but 1 percent of the public is simply delusional.
Mitt Romney is now
tanking in the polls, Republicans' chances of taking back the Senate, despite 33 seats up for grabs, have fallen to
21 percent, and even John Boehner admits there's a
1-in-3 chance
he won't be Speaker next year. We are witnessing a full-on implosion of
the Republican Party. GOP used to stand for "Grand Old Party," but it
now stands for "Greedy Old Plutocrats." The Republican Party is now no
longer a major party, and their nominee for the presidency openly
mocking poor people at a $50,000-per-plate fundraiser is no better
indicator.
Since the GOP is an irrelevant third party now, and still being
invited to the presidential debates, how about we let other third party
candidates debate? Jill Stein, from the Green Party, has a
2 percent rating in the polls despite a fraction of the fundraising capacity, and is on the ballot in 38 states.
Libertarian
Gary Johnson
is winning voters over as a presidential candidate who acknowledges the
corporate corruption of the two major parties and the electoral process
as a whole. All third parties deserve to be heard by the American
voting public on the debate stage.
Even the Republicans.
