by Roger Ray, March 2, 2016

It is difficult to tear your eyes away from an impending train wreck but it should be easier to do if you are standing on the tracks in the path of the crash. The build up to the 2016 presidential election seemed like a media carnival game until it stopped being a game. It didn’t happen all at once but both major parties in the USA are appearing to be shocked by the lack of compliance of voters who do not seem to be doing their bidding.

After two generations of using fear and greed to manipulate their voters, the Republican Party now finds itself in possession of the candidate they created. By blowing the dog whistles of racism, misogyny, homophobia, xenophobia, and blaming the poor for being poor and the sick for being sick the Republicans should hardly be surprised that Donald Trump appeals to voters who have been trained to respond to the most base and irrational motivations of human depravity. The economic top 1% have always just manipulated the angry-white-man vote in order to continue to exploit the rest of the nation but now the consequences of their hot-air angst has taken human form in a candidate from their own ranks who refuses to wear their leash. On Super Tuesday, Trump effectively accomplished a hostile takeover of the GOP.

The Democratic Party has been trying to pull off a coronation of Hillary Clinton with the only fly in the ointment being an aging senator who has been virtually unknown in 47 of these 50 states until the past six months. The fact that he claims no membership in any organized religion nor even membership in the Democratic Party until last year and he looks like he combs his hair with a balloon, is not what has kept him from posing a greater threat to Clinton. The dog whistle being blown by party officials is the word “socialism.”

This morning I woke up in a nation defended by our socialist army, navy, air force, and Marines. I showered in socialist water, heated by socialist electricity, drove on socialist streets patrolled by our socialist police force, to work in an office protected by a socialist fire department to use my socialist public school and state university education to write this article for a public whose economy is more than 80% socialist in spite of the fact that they tell themselves that they hate socialism. May I remind you that a capitalist is someone who makes a profit from capital? If you work for a salary, you are not a capitalist. Let me narrow this down for you. Paris Hilton is a capitalist. Your kids’ schoolteacher is a socialist.

Regardless of how politicians try to manipulate you with fear and greed, the greatest threats to the future of this country are income disparity, an out of control military budget, global climate change, and the rising costs of health care and higher education. No matter what they discuss in debates, these are the issues our next president must address and the only candidate who has been consistently addressing these real issues for the past generation is Bernie Sanders.