Self Inflicted Wounds

By Bob Wood, TMO

Editor’s note:  Bob Wood is a financial planner and long-time columnist for TMO.  His opinions are his own.

The 2014 mid-term elections are over, and boy, did we do it to ourselves again. The results speak not only to the power of big money in politics, but also the inability of the electorate to form opinions worthy of their voting privileges.

The election cycle was what you should expect for the $4 billion spent in campaign bribes…I mean contributions. Ideas and issues important to us all took their usual back seat to negative attack ads meant to frighten voters into ignoring their own best interests.

Look only to the ease in which Senators Inhofe of Oklahoma, McConnell of Kentucky and Sessions of Alabama were sent back to Washington’s power center. Mr. Sessions ran unopposed, meaning the Democrats didn’t even bother to contest his seat!

Keep in mind firstly that all three of them were in the Senate when the country chose to go to war in Iraq to find and eradicate Saddam’s WMD’s, and to invade Afghanistan to flush out Osama bin Laden and punish the Taliban.

It seems evident that we lost both wars given how difficult it is to show what we’ve won there. To paraphrase the war strategist Carl von Clausewitz, if you can’t show evidence of what you’ve won in a war, you’ve lost. What exactly have we won in Iraq and Afghanistan? We know what we’ve lost though.

They supported the installation of puppet regimes in both places, now ranked in the bottom five for corruption among all world governments. The regime we installed in Iraq, led by Nouri al-Maliki, is credited with inflaming sectarian tensions there that helped spur the growth and power of ISIS.

At an enormous cost of innocent lives, and an estimated $2 trillion in treasure, I’m stunned that any of them had the nerve to ask to keep their seats!

All three have been in their positions of power since at least 1997. In that time, the national debt has exploded to an unsustainable $17 trillion. All three were advocates for deregulating the financial industry on the way to its imploding, causing the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression.

All three support stripping the EPA of its ability to enforce environmental rules, and all support the building of the Keystone XL pipeline, encouraging the production of some of the most environmentally damaging energy production, the Canadian tar sands. All are vocal supporters of hydraulic fracking, shown to cause pollution of our precious water resources and causing elevated rises of toxic petroleum hydrocarbons in the air near the wells including benzene, ethyl-benzene, toluene and xylene.

According to The American Society of Civil Engineers, the nation’s infrastructure rates a score of D- as to the condition of our roads, bridges, electricity grid and schools. Our best and brightest are saddled with roughly $1.2 trillion in student loan debt, a national embarrassment.

Isn’t it something that they so easily find the billions needed to wage wars of choice in support of our energy companies while the safety of each of us and the education of our young go begging for funding?

All three support the arming of ‘’moderate rebel groups’’ in places like Syria, with news coming almost daily of weapons sent previously having been captured or surrendered to not-so-moderate groups like ISIS, which we are now trying to destroy lest they kill our own soldiers with our own weapons.

According to United Health Foundation, the three states that re-elected the Senators mentioned here rank in the bottom seven of the fifty states in overall health of its citizens.  Each ranks between #39 and #42 in child poverty. They rank 43rd or worse in deaths caused by cardiovascular disease. All three rank in the bottom quartile as having the worst health care systems in America.

All three remain bitter opponents of The Affordable Care Act, dubbed ‘’Obamacare’’, which hoped to make health care coverage available to many more Americans. All three strongly oppose raising the minimum wage even though voters in four low wage red states, Alaska, Arkansas, Nebraska and South Dakota, all passed a wage hike in their states on election night.

How have their electors benefitted from their leadership? Given that they make laws that affect all of us, how has any American benefitted from their work over the past 17 years?

Can we blame them for this? Actually, no. They only serve the interests of those who paid to get them elected. We can safely assume those campaign millions didn’t come from the average voter in Alabama, which ranks # 42 in personal incomes, or from voters in Kentucky, ranked # 44. Oklahomans rank # 32 in personal incomes, and the concentration of energy companies likely owes to how an imbecile like Mr. Inhofe keeps his job there.

Mr. Inhofe is a leading voice in calling global warming a hoax designed to enrich environmental groups, and especially Al Gore. That he has no credentials whatsoever in the study of climate science, in contrast to the overwhelming opposing opinions of those that do, means nothing. He’s paid to support an agenda, not our best interests as people.

Now, in fairness to the electorate who voted these imposters back into power, this was in part due to low voter turnout. Maybe more people than I realize have come to see voting as futile, as I do. The system is corrupt, so it doesn’t really matter who gets in.

The performance of President Obama no doubt generated much of this apathy. The man who promised hope and change delivered more of the same. His refusal to allow investigations into illegal activities of the Bush administration in lying us into the Iraq War and allegations of torture, now admitted by people like Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney, and his granting an essential amnesty to Wall Street’s biggest crooks, sapped much enthusiasm from his supporters.

After campaigning as a liberal Democrat, he governed much more like the moderate Republican he defeated in 2008. Aside from his watered down health care program and his successful push to allow gays to openly serve in the military, can you think of one principle he stood for that benefitted the poor, middle class or workers in America, otherwise known as the majority of us?

While I am very much a ‘’live and let live’’ liberal and favor equal rights for any responsible citizen, Obama’s legacy on furthering gay rights, while laudable, is thin gruel for building a legacy that future historians and supporters will be proud of. Even he may be asking, ‘’is that all’’?

Maybe the biggest problem we have in the choices we have at election time is the pervasive influence of money and the candidates big donors deem viable, and acceptable. That usually involves choosing the most pliable to their favored legislation, which always centers on more for them.

Both Presidents Bush and Obama were voted into two terms as our leader. President Bush left office to catcalls, taking a low approval rating with him back to Texas. Should the current trend hold for another two years, Obama will take an equally low rating home with him.

How is it that the two men seen worthy to serve a full eight years in the White House so disillusion us in the end? In the case of Mr. Bush, incompetence and corruption throughout his administration seem most responsible for his low approval rating and tainted legacy.

Mr. Obama will leave town carrying the burden of knowing he serially disappointed his most ardent supporters. His may be the most disappointing administration compared to expectations in living memory.

Now we look forward to the next election cycle featuring the run for the next president. Currently, we see the media promoting a contest between Hillary Clinton and Jeb Bush. Is that it? Is the list of viable candidates really so small that they are the best options we‘ll get? Another Bush or another Clinton? Well, to the major corporations, Wall Street and the ultra-richest among us, those two have likely already cut their deals with the devils in charge. Both have no doubt agreed to sell us out for the billion dollars in campaign money needed to run, and the push from the big media outlets that sell us on who has a chance to win, and who does not.

You don’t want to waste your vote on a third party candidate, even if you agree with his or her stances on the issues now, do you?

If voters accept this charade yet again, it’s on them alone. Living in a democracy isn’t free. If we choose not to care enough to demand more from our political system, we run the real risk of electing the next leader who will desert us when it matters most, and who will leave office with a typically low approval rating.

The biggest mistakes we make in life are those we inflict on ourselves. As a nation, no external threat can harm us more than we can internally. We have to care enough to make an effort to demand real change, and candidates that care about our best interests. It’s up to us. We can’t afford to keep failing ourselves like this.

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