The Dems will get slaughtered in November's election. This will happen not so much because of the "socialist' crimes they are alleged by the right to have committed -- which are of course utter nonsense -- but simply because of what they have *not* done, which is to aggressively pursue real solutions to the nation's problems. Then Obama will be hounded by congressional investigations into all manner of bogus issues.

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As Weiss Research financial analyst Mike Larson says in the latest Safe Money Report:

Despite all the siren songs by Washington politicians and Wall Street fat cats, the facts most Americans can see with their own eyes paint a very different, much darker, picture

• The housing slump has returned with a vengeance ...
• Unemployment is sky-high ...
• Consumers -- 70% of the economy -- are slashing their spending ...
• Despite the Fed's efforts to keep interest rates low, it's actually getting harder to borrow money!

Time after time, you have to wonder WHY there's such a glaring discrepancy between what you see with your own eyes and what everyone is telling you. And the answer is that Washington and Wall Street are lying through their teeth. The bald fact is that nearly everyone we trust to lead the economy or manage our money has serious conflicts of interest -- powerful incentives to make sure you do not know the truth:

• Politicians and bureaucrats need you to believe they're saving the day or they could lose their jobs ...
• Financial fat cats and CEOs need you to believe it's OK to buy their stocks again or their own shares in their companies will crash in value, and
• Rating agencies like S&P, Moody's, and Fitch need you to believe their ratings are reliable or the companies they rate will stop paying them for their ratings, and the agencies themselves will go belly-up.

The fact is, these rating agencies gave the most notorious flops of this crisis their highest ratings, right up until the bitter end: AIG ... Bear Stearns ... Citigroup ... Fannie Mae ... Freddie Mac ... Lehman Brothers ... Wachovia ... Washington Mutual and others all were rated highly.

And because "the customer is always right" ... and their paying customers are the very companies they rate ... you can bet your bottom dollar that nearly all the other ratings they've issued -- especially for the biggest companies that still pay the biggest fees -- are also deeply conflicted.

The disturbing truth behind the hype and happy talk

If the economy is recovering ...WHY ARE BANKRUPTCIES EXPLODING?!

According to the American Bankruptcy Institute, the number of U.S. companies filing for bankruptcy each year has TRIPLED since 2006 and is setting new records this year. PLUS, the number of personal bankruptcy filings is soaring -- up as much as 35% per month so far in 2010!

No need to sugar coat the facts: The worst of this recession is NOT behind us, and the recovery is a sham -- a temporary respite bought and paid for by Washington. According to U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO), the government's own watchdog agency, Washington has spent on the bailout a staggering $3.7 trillion so far. But now that bailout money is running out, and America's financial judgment day is near.

I'm talking about an economic catastrophe that will:

• Erase what little home equity Americans have left, wiping out up to 100% of the nation's #1 source of retirement money, sentencing millions to poverty and driving foreclosure rates through the roof.
• Push banks like Citibank, Bank of America, Wells Fargo, JPMorgan Chase, US Bankcorp, SunTrust, Capital One, and many others back to the edge of the precipice.
• Greatly diminish the U.S. dollar's buying power and end the greenback's reign as the world's reserve currency.
• Kill what little consumer spending is left in the economy, slash corporate earnings and leave the stock market a smoking ruin.

What follows next is a synopsis of a great article by political science professor David Michael Green:

In the 1930s, the only thing we had to fear was fear, itself. Today, the main thing we have to fear is us, ourselves.

We live in a country -- nay, an empire! -- that insists on destroying itself. We're part of the generation of self-induced decline. Our people are the fools who perfected the fine art of committing suicide by stupidity. It's an astonishing phenomenon, and one of wide participation.

The Republican Party was once a moderately conservative, pro-business outfit -- until it was highjacked by the oligarchy and turned into a full-on predatory machine, hiding behind the facade of hate, mobilizing issues like bogus overseas threats abroad and uppity brown people and demanding women at home. Basically, any way that middle class white males could be distracted from their sinking economic status -- through the diversion of a sense of superiority over others, or the supposed threat to that superior status -- was employed to cover for a party whose true agenda was to quietly produce the greatest transfer of wealth in all of human history.

Having succeeded dramatically, they are back at it again. It is now transparent, for anyone who cares to look, that the ugly tea party movement in America is an invention of the Koch brothers, Rupert Murdoch, Dick Armey and their sick ilk, once again mobilizing a boatload of fools who are angry, but too stupid to know quite why. This explains their endless rhetoric about the evils of the federal government, and their simultaneous desire to keep their Social Security and Medicare benies. It also explains their unmatched idiocy in serving as tools for their own destruction. If they succeed, they fail. If they get their champions elected, they lose their government-provided goodies. Brilliant.

America's elite are already fantastically rich, yet are absolutely hell-bent on getting richer, even if that means knocking hundreds of millions of people out of America's middle class and in many cases reducing them to absolute poverty and homelessness.

How do we explain people who would do this? Are they not essentially sociopathic? Are they not made of essentially the same stuff as those who can kill without guilt or remorse? Especially so when you consider that even the greediest among us reach a limit beyond which one cannot effectively even make use of the next dollar and the one beyond that, so that pushing others into poverty is no longer even for purposes of one's own benefit, but instead becomes some kind of sick sport.

Whatever the explanation for such illness, the effects of their efforts are certainly plain to see. We're talking here about a class of Americans who have been essentially offended by the diminishment of inequality that was produced in America during the middle part of the twentieth century, due to national policies ranging from the New Deal to the Great Society, Republican administrations included.

America's socio-economic structure changed dramatically during that time, and almost entirely for the better. A huge middle class that had never existed before came into being. Anti-poverty programs took the worst sting out of living conditions for the poor. And America became the greatest economic dynamo since the Roman Empire. Meanwhile, by the way, the rich remained very, very rich.

But that was not enough for them. So they have made a concerted effort over the last generation or so to take the country back to the bad old days of Herbert Hoover and Calvin Coolidge. Think about that for a second. What sort of elevated sickness, what sort of parental deprivation in childhood, what sort of total absence of conscience and consciousness is required to produce a group of people with that mentality?

I don't know. But I do know that their plan worked. As Robert Kuttner notes in The American Prospect: "For more than three decades, the wages of American workers have been close to flat while economic insecurity has risen massively. Although the productivity of the U.S. economy has doubled in a generation, most of those gains have not been captured by workers. And in the decade that began in 2001, inflation-adjusted wages have fallen for all but the most affluent 3% of the population.

"This pattern of deepening inequality was well entrenched before the financial collapse -- which only made things worse. In 2006, economists at Goldman Sachs, sounding almost Marxian, reported that 'the most important contributor to higher profit margins over the past five years has been a decline in labor's share of national income.' By 2006, wages as a percentage of gross domestic product were already at their lowest share, 45%, since government began keeping statistics in 1947. In the past three years, the decline in worker earnings has only intensified, as worker bargaining power was undermined by very high unemployment (stemming from an insane trade policy, began by Reagan, that has encouraged millions of well-paid jobs to be transferred to low wage countries where US corporations build factories, hire local workers, and ship product back to the US tariff free). As the economy has stumbled toward a feeble recovery, corporate profits and executive bonuses have rebounded smartly, but salaries and wages have, not surprisingly, sunk.

In the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s, wages and productivity moved upward together, almost in lockstep. However, beginning in the 1970s, as government regulation of labor conditions faltered, trade with nations that exploited their own workers increased, and corporations declared open war on unions, the lines representing wages and productivity spread apart. Productivity kept increasing, while median wages stayed nearly flat."

As Robert Reich noted in a recent New York Times op-ed, the richest 1% of Americans have tripled their share of the nation's income, going from a 9% share of the total national income (right before the Reagan era began), to nearly 25% of it today. As Reich also reminds us, the last time this tripling happened was in 1928. I would rush to say, "Hey, remember how that one turned out?", but it's pretty unnecessary to crack the history books for that reference, since we're now living it. As just about the stupidest society that ever was, we've decided to get together, child-like, to explore the fun and exciting question, "What would happen if America had a devastating economic downturn once again?!?!"

But there is one big difference between today and the 1930s. In the 30s there was a real political party in America -- the one that did the New Deal and the Great Society -- that stood up for the middle class and the poor. But Bill Clinton and Barack Obama have led the Democrats down a different path, and now the party stands for a slightly weaker version of the GOP's "plutocracy protection service."

By the way, what sort of psychology explains how a Clinton, Kerry or Obama, smart as they are, can be so passive, even when getting their heads handed to them by the most scurrilous of creeps on the political landscape -- pieces of garbage who could be destroyed with the slightest show of self-defense and political courage?

Obama came into his presidency with more wind in his sails than perhaps anyone since Johnson in 1964, and this for a black man with an Islamic name, no less. Then he blew it, utterly and completely. The indications of this are everywhere -- there are Democrats running for Congress today who are literally running TV ads dissing Barack Obama and Nancy Pelosi. And even those who are not, mostly don't want the president showing up in their districts before this election.

Now the latest polls are showing Republicans with a 10% lead in generic congressional ballots. This is the biggest lead they've ever had in the 68-year history of polling. Meanwhile, half of Republican voters are enthusiastic about voting this November compared to only one-fourth of Democrats who are. On top of everything else, Republicans are doing this well despite having nothing to offer in terms of a plan for solving the problems that are upsetting voters. They will cut taxes on the rich. That's it. The entirety of the rest of what they stand for is simply "NO!!!" to all things Obama.

Now, think about this for a second, and bear in mind that when it comes to the GOP we are talking about a political party that the very same polls show voters still hating! How astonishingly inept do you have to be to turn the world upside down and hand not only resurrection but in fact control of Congress to such thugs? What kind of a full-blown multiple-car crash of a Democrat politician do you have to be to make the party of Bush, Cheney, Boehner and McConnell seem preferable to the party of FDR and JFK -- and by a wide margin?!

Wait. Don't answer yet. It gets worse. In 2003, the ratio of Democratic to Republican identifying/leaning voters was about 50 to 40 among young voters, known as the Millennial generation. By 2008, via a combination of the effects of both George W. Bush and candidate Barack Obama, that ratio had moved an astonishing distance to provide a whopping gap of 62 to 30. Now, less than two years into the administration of "Mr. We-Are-The-Ones-We've-Been-Waiting-For," it is back to 54 to 40! These are incredible swings that are usually far more stable. And they are incredibly important, because there is good evidence to suggest that voters who select a given party over a series of elections in the early part of their lives wind up keeping that party ID for life.

In other words, Democrats had an opportunity here to lock in with an entire generation of new voters, giving them a hugely disproportionate preference to continue voting for them. Imagine the difference this would have made in elections for the next seventy(!) years, especially over time as these Millennials replaced older, more conservative, voters in the electorate, and as they themselves came to turn out in larger proportion each election cycle, as every generation does when it ages. Democrats could have come close to locking up control of American government for the coming half-century, just as they essentially did after 1932. Instead, the party's leaders have alienated this new generation so much that they have returned their numbers to the period when George Bush and his party were highly popular!

Obama and the Democrats will get slaughtered in November. This will happen not so much because of the "socialist' crimes they are alleged by the right to have committed -- which are of course utter nonsense -- but simply because of what they have not done, which is to aggressively pursue real solutions to the country's problems. Yet, because of the "socialist,' "big-spending,' "freedom-crushing' narrative that the "regressives" have successfully foisted upon the Dems, the administration will have no option after the election but to tack yet further to the right in the ensuing two years.

That will be disastrous for Obama, for Democrats and for the country

Like Clinton before him, Obama will try to placate these Republican monsters (backed by their sponsoring oligarchy) by moving to the right. Of course, there is absolutely nothing there except tax cuts for the wealthy (he is already proposing tax cuts for the bottom 98%). The Republicans have no other solutions for the economy (or anything else, for that matter), though these dam-busting boondoggles for the fiscally obese are, of course, no solution either. And, like Clinton before him, Obama will be relentlessly hounded by congressional investigations into every manner of bogus scandal that the fevered minds of the closeted perverts on the right can dream up to keep the administration reeling, off balance, and incapacitated.

Authors Bio:

Several years after receiving my M.A. in social science (interdisciplinary studies) I was an instructor at S.F. State University for a year, but then went back to designing automated machinery, and then tech writing, in Silicon Valley. I've always been more interested in political economics and what's going on behind the scenes in politics, than in mechanical engineering, and because of that I've rarely worked more than 8 months a year, devoting much of the rest of the year to reading and writing about that which interests me most.