Paralysis, please / Socialist Senator? - no comments

I really ought to appear more thoughtful and more interested in the US Midterm elections. However incompetent, corrupt, indecent, and profligate the US Republicans and their Administration - and necessary their gradual ejection from power - it's still hard to enthuse over the consequent Democrat gains, or that party's prospects.

I suspect the feeling going through the minds of most on the centre and left in the UK and Europe - a fair few people - is simply "Just stop everything, we don't like one single thing we hear coming out of the USA", which is hardly a ringing endorsement of the Democratic campaign, let alone an appropriate programme for a superpower with enormous potential to use its power and influence for the greater good.

Perhaps the fact that my sole non-blogging news source is The Economist - which appears to regard both main parties with contempt - is to blame for my lack of faith. It does offer up the argument that a divided Government (President's party does not control House and Senate), historically, keeps better control over spending than unified ones, and should reduce the vast sums wasted through pork barrel-rolling (earmarks increased tenfold since the Republicans took the House in 1994). Still, that hardly gives the Democrats the capability to launch their own vision, a vision they're brave enough to sell to the American electorate.

Moreover Democrat appeals to America's protectionist streak: opposing free trade, globalisation, and defending domestic workers at a cost to the world economy, is far from encouraging. The appropriate response to an Administration that has thrust American influence upon the world is to use that influence more intelligently: to make diplomacy work, to make globalisation work, and to use its influence to tackle global warming, against the conservative forces that are stacked against each - not to appease those at home and abroad who are frightened and unsettled by economic, social, and political change, and who would rather the USA just went away.

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Meanwhile, both Harry's Place and The Daily flag up Vermont Congressman Bernie Sanders, highly likely to be elected America's only Independent Socialist Senator.

Could he really be the only US politician worth voting for today? He certainly seems like a good egg. Personality-wise, he seems just the kind of politician we'd like to see, and he's angry about the things we ought to be angry about: poverty, squalor, unemployment, the homogenised corporate media, and so on. Whether his policies are right is another matter altogether:

As bad as that is, we should be very aware that our unfettered free trade policy is not only leading to the destruction of traditional manufacturing and blue collar jobs. It is leading to the loss of millions of high-tech, information technology jobs as well. These are the jobs, we have been told for years, that our children would be inheriting and are being educated for.

To address these concerns, I have introduced legislation to repeal Permanent Normal Trade Relations with China (H.R. 728). This bill currently has over 70 co-sponsors, including 19 Republicans. I am also supporting legislation to repeal NAFTA. I am strongly opposed to the Central American Free Trade Agreement. And, I will be re-introducing the Defending American Jobs Act to prohibit large corporations from receiving corporate welfare if they lay-off a larger percentage of American workers than workers overseas.

That's economic nationalism and sentimentality, but - first and foremost - false economy. Bernie advocates an increase in the minimum wage to $8.15 over two years (a mere £4.27 at current rates), though not the minimum income that would most benefit the poorest. Politicians do, of course, have to be elected.

So, I may not entirely agree with Bernie's analysis, or his policies for achieving those worthy aims, but even that raises him above most of his fellow candidates.

Update: Sounds like he's made it.