Editors Note: Guest post from Brandon Melendez on political collaboration to solve economic issues. -M.P.
The middle road to economic recovery is the desperately needed solution to the employment draught in this country. For all the talk of reaching across the aisle for answers, the aisle isn’t as wide as the parties would have you believe—it’s just a matter of pleasing specific constituent groups who occupy different rungs of the corporate latter and socially segregated tax brackets. The Game of Thrones, which we call The Presidential Election Cycle, is the main event in attaining control between the powerful Big Two political parties—which are essentially massive self-serving corporations unto themselves. Intrinsic to their self-serving nature is to stroke their base, whom have come to understand that campaign promises are only rhetoric, and that their re-election hinges heavily on their improvisation in the changing winds of a first term rather than the fruition of empty promises.
All politicians are two-faced to one degree or another—telling us what we want to hear out of one side and weathering the storm and abandoning their “promise” baggage with the other. Bit by bit, as the storm ebbs away, they may attempt to hit the tip of the iceberg on these promises and call them great successes when they are in fact faints and dodges. The American political theater has become the American Political Theater where all the world is a stage and our politicians and officials are just playing roles. Politicking and grandstanding at the podium have replaced Realpolitik and straight talk. Compromise is now seen as weakness and flip-flopping, and ideological rigidity is regarded as logic and strength. It is therefore reasonable that any plans—especially ones as airy and lacking in detail as this election is promising—are just vespers and shadow puppetry. With the biggest issue of this cycle resting in the arena of economic and financial woe, we can expect little of the rhetoric we hear to bear fruit in terms of dollars and cents.