Why It All Sounds Like 'Blah, Blah, Blah'

[Donnachaidh]

http://smirkingchimp.com/thread/donna-smith/37490/why-it-all-sounds-like-blah-blah-blah

When push comes to shove everybody gets their political cover moments in Washington, DC. Everybody, that is, except the average working class American. The sound and fury surrounding debt ceilings and deficit reduction swirl on multiple levels, activists in the conservative right claim advancement and activists in the disenfranchised liberal left plan protests. And the President claims he is governing from the middle ground, which is ever so much different than campaigning, so we’re always told. And so it goes. Cycle after cycle after cycle as working class people work to stay afloat in a society and economy increasingly disconnected from their realities.

Look (thought I’d start with the word of admonition no one seems to expunge from our current vernacular), no one in Washington, DC, circles of power lives in the world in which the rest of working class America does. No one. Not the President and his beautiful family. Not the Congressional members and their DC-home district split life-styles. Not the lobbyists on “K” Street. Not even the career public servants who dutifully ride the Metro every day to and fro and fuel the inner workings of the city without formal representation in Congress. It is an artificial world where toilets are cleaned and children are cared for by very real, underpaid people that has to occasionally nod outward towards the rest of America.

Every couple of years, the DC rentals turn over as one major political party or the other retains or regains power in DC. Upscale salons and restaurants shift their services and menus while service workers cater to new clients now earning the larger volume of DC salaries. It is a cycle of in and out, up and down, through and through that simultaneously confounds and corrupts. No one is safe ultimately; no one is truly secure. Some people entrench themselves with DC-based organizations and leaders least subject to bi-yearly ebbs and flows – and their safety comes from safely riding the waves of change, at one point being the outcasts throwing stones at the houses of power and at other times resting comfortably inside, cocktails in hand.

It’s no wonder that it is hard to trust the whole lot and sometimes even harder to understand what it is they are saying to one another and to the rest of us about any subject.

More at the link --