"when America' officially embarked on the era of "free trade" with Mexico and China."

The US does not have a free trade agreement with China.

http://www.ustr.gov/trade-agreements/free-trade-agreements

pink mist

Gutsy progressive Senator? Where? That is oxymoronic.

The author of this article has a very short and/or selective memory. GATT/WTO/NAFTA etc. were approved of by a bipartisan consensus.

The little differences between the two corporate R/D brands is that the Rs are usually a bit more honest about their agenda. And the Ds are more slick and sophisticated in their lies.

No matter who wins, policies shift ever-rightward just like they have in the last few years. I guarantee it

Meanwhile China has reportedly built the Worlds fastest supercomputer which gives them two of the most powerful Computers in the World and work towards doubling that Computers power within a decade.

With US students now being taught the World was created in 4000 BC, That Man Co-existed with Dinosaurs as the "Flinstones Documentary" outlines and that Noahs flood created the Grand Canyon it does not look too promising for US Hi-tech outside the ability to KILL peoples.

The US still has a significant lead over the rest of the World in Financial fraud.

"I can hire one half of the working-class to kill the other half."
--Jay Gould, Gilded Age rail tycoon and real estate speculator

Recent poll numbers aired on PBS News Hour last night suggest that in regions of the country suffering growing rates of home foreclosure, the former or soon-to-be-former owners of those homes tend to increasingly politically align themselves with growing Tea Parties in the same areas. Most of these folks are not part of the earlier cohort of folks who lost their homes overwhelmingly due to inability to pay sub-prime or adjustable rate mortgages, but are folks with standard 30 year fixed rate mortgages who can no longer pay their house notes because they've lost their jobs. Continuing government lay-offs and insufficient job creation over coming years will feed this monster.

It's easy for many of us middle-aged & older progressives to forget that the generation of Americans now in what should have been their most productive years (between 20 and 35 years of age) have been subjected their entire lives to right-wing and far-right propaganda indoctrination and deteriorating public schools that offered no other coherent explanation of history or current events from an authentically liberal or progressive perspective. Religious fundamentalists have also had a growing negative effect on public school history, literature and social studies texts and society in general over the last 30 years.

So it's no wonder that as the lay-offs, insufficient job creation, home foreclosures (and resultant loss of neighborhood equity) continue for what may be years with no end in sight, and incompetent, sold-out politicians dominating both major Parties lack the brains, integrity or guts to do what needs to be done to preserve some sense of decency and social compassion in this increasingly barbaric country, that these ignorant and/or brainwashed generations losing their homes are predictably reacting by moving to the irrational but familiarly ultra-materialist far-right. That far-right serves them up poorer, more vulnerable scape-goats and falsely justifies the notion of limitless greed that should be preserved at all other costs above the law or any attempt at sane regulation.

Most of their men, especially, have been listening to Rush Limbaugh all their lives. He began dominating the white male 18-to-35 demographic in the early 1980s and that went on for over a decade until Fox News, Sean Hannity, Lou Dobbs and Glenn Beck came on the scene to aid and abet this fascist agit-prop. CNN gradually moved to the far-right after Ted Turner sold out controlling interest to AOL-Time Warner in the 1990s and eventually began providing platforms for evil clowns like Dobbs and Beck.

The upshot of all this is that it's going to take time for these newly foreclosed-upon, standard 30 year fixed mortgage borrowers to economically fall into the growing, disenfranchised lower-class and fully realize that the kind of might-makes-right, cannibal casino capitalism they've worshipped all their deluded lives is leaving them and their families nowhere with nothing.

They've got to hit a few hard trees on the way down first: They've got to exhaust their "big government" unemployment benefits. Then they've got to run through their savings to cover monthly expenses. They've got to start selling off stock and liquidating IRAs. They've got to sell off material possessions at yard sales and online. Then they've got to see their spouses and children suffer from humiliation, inability to afford the latest electronic goodies, nice clothes, cars, private schools, their children being shared out to other relatives, their parents wandering from city-to-city or State-to-State looking for jobs that no longer exist, and all the intensifying misery and psychological hell that goes with it.

If a Brownshirt movement centered around returning unemployed war veterans doesn't merge with the Tea Baggers into a full-blown Nazi movement that absorbs these volk first, then many of them will gradually realize that the only human beings with any real answers to their problems are authentic, pro-cooperative movement, socially compassionate progressives, socially compassionate liberals (many of whom will be going through their own intense self-re-education out of blind corporatism & militarism), and some Kropotkinist back-to-the-land Left libertarians.

Will that realization be timely enough and wide-spread enough to prevent the envelopment of America by nakedly fascist barbarism and Balkanization? That's definitely not going to be answered by this mid-term election either way. The forces already unleashed in this country (and around the world) will take years to play out. It might be better to let the traditional seamless incompetence of the post-1970s Right and far-Right to actually govern hit the realpolitik fan over the next two election cycles BEFORE the Tea Party foreclosed-upon and unemployed veterans add millions more to their numbers. It will be a stark object lesson in butt-sweating fear for the entire nation. But it might terrify some of the more left-leaning Dimocraps into some courageous sense to become splitters and call out their traitor DLC "leaders." It might be the very last chance for the poor and progressive to unite into a new movement. Think of it as an early smallpox vaccination. Sure, there's a risk, but it's better than facing full-blown smallpox with no (in this case psychological) immunity whatsoever.

Much of what is happening in the world and in the country now, and what will soon happen, is historically unprecedented. By 2020 we will either have a very withered and very different United States whose collective soul will be like a 3rd degree burn victim, but which is still capable of some gradual healing, or a scorched earth dystopian toxic nightmare that few of us--even those of us who know history--can now imagine.

"At heart, this election is about whether or not we will continue to effectively repeal the econimic gains of the 20th century."

that's guaranteed at this point no matter what's the outcome of this election.....

The tea-partyists will be repealing the Enlightenment before we know it.

The good part of the 20th century is already nearly repealed while the bad part remains and will only get worse. The election results are irrelevant.

Metal, that's the script and the actors are already on stage. The only thing you've left out of this devastating analysis is the ecological disasters that will make life even more unbearable for an American lumpenproletariat.

As for what Fascism will do to the US: Hitler's Nazi Party created jobs for their millions of unemployed by gearing up for war, just as our Defense Dept has recruited the unemployable and the White House created the wars to send them to. That policy destroyed Germany and it is destroying the US. Do you see any other country coming to our rescue? The Chinese? the Indians? South America? The EU? I don't.

Back to the Dark Ages, before Television, airplanes, taxes...

Is this guy talking about Bill Clinton and Glass-Steagall, NAFTA, Iraq Sanctions, etcetera?

Maybe he was sleepwalking during that Neanderthals' reign of terror.

All these jackass donkey promoters have to push is fear. The Repubs and Dems should not be seen as separate. They are complimentary pieces of the State apparatus.

Seen more accurately there is actually no election occurring at all. There is only a forced validation of tyranny with slightly different flavors of boot offered for our necks.

Corporate America, you are so silly, and scary.

"Taxes cost jobs!" Wow, how you know, you don't pay any!