Why I vote for Democrats

Yep, everything has to be recalibrated: pension plans, political contributions, retirement savings, and executive pay, among other things.

The Republicans of the 2000s done f*cked up: from 9/11 happening on their watch, to the false Iraq War, to the Wall Street bailout caused in large part during the unregulated free market in subprime mortgage-backed securities from 2004-2007, which had begun in earnest during George W. Bush’s first term, January 2001 to January 2005.

Oh, then the Republicans’ big finale after eight long years: the Great Recession (October 2007 to ????).*

* The Great Recession is officially over, by economic standards. However, the distribution of wealth created in this country has gone overwhelmingly to the top 1% and even more so to the top 0.01% during the Great Recession recovery, which is still dragging on for tens of millions of American people who are unemployed, underemployed, underwater-mortgage holders, and everyone burdened by a student loan that they can’t pay off because they can’t find a job that pays a living wage after graduating with a college degree. Yes, the Great Recession is over for those who caused it. Nobody on Wall Street related to the subprime mortgage meltdown went to jail, nobody. Instead, they’re all getting richer. So pyramidal, but definitely not an example of John Wooden’s “Pyramid of Success.”

Barack Obama has been a pussycat to Wall Street (Nobody went to jail). Yes, the banks paid tens of billions of dollars in fines to the U.S. government, but that’s after George W. Bush and Hank Paulson (Goldman Sachs’ Treasury Secretary, and the U.S. Secretary in name only) gave out $700 billion largesse to save the banks and then let them borrow at practically 0% on Trillions of dollars in loans. The U.S was printing money and the banks were making money with that money, and then the banks paid off the loans at close to zero percent. What the f*ck?! Can I get one of those loans? Please?

Goldman Sachs got to double dip on the bailout, because we paid off their sugar daddy, American Insurance Group (AIG), and then bailed out Goldman, too. AIG was part of a “swap” market, or secondary market, where the banks could make bets on their bets. So they took a subprime mortgage loan and attached insurance to it, and said I bet this price goes up. The price of the subprime mortgage loan went down. Way down. But AIG got most of its money back and Goldman got a lot of its money back as well. They can cry all the way to their yachts if they think they didn’t get a sweetheart deal while the average American is twisting in the wind with a ripped-to-shreds 401k clutched in balled hands of fury.

At least Democrats are trying to clean up the mess, instead of obstructing the clean-up effort, like the Republicans continue to do. This time, let’s vote for the Democrats. Republicans make messes and Democrats clean up the mess. You can’t trust Republicans to do the right thing: that’s just something they made up to get people to vote for them. And you fell for it if you voted for the Republicans. They are in it to win it for the Super Rich, and not the average American.

The Democrats do more to benefit the majority of Americans monetarily than the other party does. That’s the truth. We now have Wall Street regulation with the Frank-Dodd Act (albeit watered down), we now have a Consumer Financial Protection Bureau so credit card companies can’t hike the interest rate way up on you out of nowhere (or for one late payment), and we now have Universal Health Care (the epitome of a “slowly but surely” work in progress).

It ain’t perfect with the Democrats, but it’s way better protection from another Republican-led financial meltdown. Republicans make messes and Democrats clean up the mess. We’re still dealing with the aftermath of George W. Bush’s Republican kind of thinking, which wasn’t very perceptive it turned out. The Republican-led Congress of 2010 until now has been an ankle weight on this country’s true recovery from the Great Recession. It’s time to free us from the shackles of the Republicans’ wrong-headed rule by voting them out of office.

We all do better when we all do better. So vote for Democrats in 2014, I say. And that’s just what I’m going to do, too. : )