Wednesday, June 11, 2014

Eric Cantor loses House Leadership & Seat in Congress - Why?

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It is rare when a Majority Leader in Congress loses his Congressional seat in any election, but when he loses in the primary it might just be the first time in our nation's history.  Add to that the fact he was 34 points ahead in the polls the week of the election, so far ahead he scheduled a national fund raiser on election day in downtown Washington, D.C. when most candidates are busy trying to rally supporters to vote, and it gets real bizarre.


Of course that is just the tip of the iceberg.  The Republican leader, second ranking to only John Boehner, Speaker of the House of Representatives, is one of the most powerful party positions in the nation.  So powerful he was able to raise 25 times more money than his primary opponent.


The opponent in Cantor's seventh congressional district of Virginia was Dave Brat, an economics and ethics professor at Randolph-Macon College in Ashland, Virginia, and political unknown who enjoyed support among some tea party activists.    

House Republicans, who are certain to vote a loser out of office, will drive Cantor to resign from the leadership position as well as the Congress because no one reaches the highest levels of a political party in the center of the hundreds of millions of dollars in campaign contributions and wants to return as a defeated candidate for the rest of the year.  Look for this change to happen by July.


Cantor was highly publicized as one of the Republican "young guns", the future leaders of the party, and it was generally recognized he was the only one who might defeat the current Speaker Boehner.  Guess he was firing blanks.

Now the White House, Democrats and national political pundits in the media are having a field day trying to explain how all of them could have been sooo wrong about the election.  They are spinning opinions about how this will invigorate the Tea Party and threaten other senior Republican elected officials.


 A few even mentioned the truth, that no major Tea Party organization even endorsed the winner.  How could the Tea Party get credit for electing someone they did not even support?  Only Laura Ingraham, a political talk show host, successful author and real conservative openly supported the challenger out of all the political mouthpieces in America, she even campaigned with him, and she graduated from the University of Virginia.


The truth is the politicians are afraid to address the real truth so they continue to  misread the electorate just like they misread this race.

Professional politicians have lost touch with the invisible Americans.  Just like Obama did, they are spending billions and billions of special interest dollars to get elected or re-elected, much of it to going professional political pundits.  Obama spent $2 billion in just two elections thanks to Wall Street, specifically Goldman Sachs, trial lawyers, health care companies, banks, insurance, pharmaceutical and a laundry list of other special interests.


So who are the "invisible Americans"?

At least one third of all registered voters are registered Independents.  They don't trust either political party.  Probably one third of the members of each party feels alienated by their own party judging by the weakness of the party polls and collapse of credibility in our elected officials.  Add to that a massive amount of people, millions, who are so disgusted or disinterested by political gridlock they won't even register to vote and you have a massive, maybe even lethal formula for political chaos.


Look at it this way.  Of the eligible voters in America, 51 million are not even registered to vote.  But they could register and vote if they are motivated.  That means nearly one of every four eligible voters does not even register.  There are over 180 million registered voters but over 40%, over 72 million, do not typically vote, especially in non-presidential elections like this year .

That means 159 million eligible voters will not vote this year while about 129 million will vote.  A majority of eligible voters refuse to participate in the current two-party system.  So what does that tell you about our democracy?  Like all other institutions in America, it is broken.

Eric Cantor did not lose because of the Tea Party or because of any party, he lost because he is one of the Washington professional politicians who worked the system and there are those people in both parties working the system throughout the house and senate.


Virginia was the leader in the first American revolution and it may just be the leader in the second American revolution to throw out the establishment, the professional politicians, and anyone associated with the special interests that now control congress, the White House and our government.

Don't believe the media, pundits and spin masters who say this is a Republican revolt or an isolated incident, this is the beginning of the people's cure to our political problems, throw the rascals out, all of them, no matter which party has their loyalty because neither party serves the best interests of the people, just their own interest of concentration of power and hijacking of our government.


It was 57 years ago in 1957 that Ayn Rand wrote Atlas Shrugged, a stunning novel of the collapse of capitalism because of greed, corruption and runaway technology.  The hero of her last novel was a mysterious stranger named John Galt.  I expect Who is John Galt signs to be popping up all over America just like in her novel and one day we will discover John Galt is the 159 million disenfranchised voters waiting in the wings to fix the mess we are in.


Perhaps Virginia was the beginning....
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