[新聞] 美國共和黨在期中選舉獲得全面性勝利
標題:Republicans win sweeping victory in US congressional election
新聞來源: http://www.wsws.org/articles/2010/nov2010/elec-n03.shtml
(須有正確連結)
By Patrick Martin
3 November 2010
With many results still being counted or too close to call, the US
congressional elections have produced a sweeping victory for the Republican
Party, which regained control of the House of Representatives, gaining as
many as 50 seats, and cut into the Democratic margin in the Senate.
Incumbent Senate Democrats Russell Feingold of Wisconsin and Blanche Lincoln
of Arkansas were defeated, and Republicans took open Senate seats in
Pennsylvania, North Dakota and Indiana. The Republican candidate was leading
early Wednesday in the contest for Barack Obama’s former Senate seat in
Illinois.
In the House of Representatives, Republicans took five seats from Democrats
in Pennsylvania, five in Ohio, at least one in Michigan, two in Indiana,
three in Illinois and two in Wisconsin, for a net gain of 18 seats in the
industrial belt, and Republicans held leads in as many as eight
Democratic-held seats in New York state, although those results were still
undecided. The Republicans also captured at least 13 Democratic-held seats in
the South, including three each in Florida, Virginia and Tennessee.
Some longstanding congressional Democrats lost their seats, including House
Budget Committee Chairman John Spratt in South Carolina, Appropriations
subcommittee chairman Rick Boucher in the coal-mining region of Virginia, and
Ike Skelton of Missouri, chairman of the House Armed Services Committee.
Republican candidates won the lion's share of the 39 state governorships,
taking control of Democratic-held statehouses in Pennsylvania, Ohio,
Michigan, Iowa, Tennessee and New Mexico, while retaining Republican-held
statehouses in Florida, Texas and Georgia. The Democrats retained New York
and Massachusetts and were leading in Illinois and California.
The electoral debacle is a devastating indictment of the Obama administration
and the Democratic Party. Two years after an overwhelming victory in the
presidential election, four years after the Republicans lost control of both
the House and the Senate, the right-wing policies of the Democrats have
created the conditions for a massive comeback by the Republicans.
The corporate-controlled media and the representatives of the two big
business parties are already proclaiming that the outcome of the election
demonstrates that the American people have shifted to the right, embracing
the “free market” nostrums of the Republican Party and the right-wing Tea
Party movement.
This contention is both stupid and ludicrous. According to these political “
experts,” in the midst of the worst economic crisis since the Great
Depression, with unemployment near double-digit levels, millions facing
foreclosure, and the poverty rate skyrocketing, the American people have
decided that they favor eliminating unemployment compensation, cutting Social
Security, closing public schools and slashing taxes for the rich.
Exit polls demonstrate that, far from a surge of popular support for the
Republicans, the outcome was determined by a collapse in the vote among those
who voted most heavily for Obama and the Democrats in 2006 and 2008. While
young voters, those 18 to 29, comprised 18 percent of the vote in 2008, they
made up only 10 percent of those who turned out at the polls on Tuesday.
Those over 65 comprised 15 percent of the vote in 2008, but 24 percent of the
vote in 2010.
The elderly shifted sharply against the Democratic Party in large measure
because of the reactionary character of the Obama health care “reform.” Far
from being a progressive measure to extend health care to the uninsured, the
Obama plan was primarily a cost-cutting measure that many of the elderly
regarded, quite correctly, as a threat to Medicare benefits. While 48 percent
of the elderly voted Republican in 2008, this figure jumped to 58 percent in
2010, one of the largest swings among any demographic group.
The collapse of support for the Democrats was the product of two years of
betrayal of the illusions promoted in the 2008 campaign. The Democratic
victories in 2006 and 2008 were fueled by popular hostility to the Bush
administration’s wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Obama appealed to these
sentiments in order to get elected, but once in office he continued the same
militarist policies, even keeping on Pentagon chief Robert Gates and General
David Petraeus, and pouring another 70,000 troops into Afghanistan.
From the beginning, Obama disavowed any effort to hold Bush officials
responsible for the blatant illegality of the wars, for torture and other war
crimes, or for the attacks on democratic rights undertaken as part of the “
war on terror.” Obama intensified domestic spying, kept the Guantanamo Bay
detention camp open, backed renewal of the Patriot Act, and declared that the
commander-in-chief had the right to order assassination of American citizens.
On economic policy, Obama brought in figures identified with Wall Street like
Timothy Geithner and Lawrence Summers to be his chief aides. He combined
solicitude for the banks with scarcely concealed indifference to the plight
of the working class. Obama moved heaven and earth to continue the bailout of
Wall Street begun under Bush, while rejecting any job-creation measures by
the federal government and describing unemployment as merely a “lagging
economic indicator.”
In the month leading up to the midterm election, the White House seemed to go
out of its way to alienate the youth and workers who turned out in 2008 to
vote for Obama, who ran as the candidate for “change” and ‘hope.” The
administration opposed a moratorium on foreclosures despite revelations about
banks fabricating documentation, lifted the ban on drilling in the Gulf of
Mexico imposed after the BP disaster, and promoted more tax breaks for
business in the name of “job-creation.”
Tuesday's electoral rout will be bemoaned by Obama's liberal apologists,
from the editorial board of the New York Times to the Nation, who will join
in blaming the American people for having “moved to the right.” In reality,
the election has exposed the Democratic Party for what it is: an alliance of
a part of the financial aristocracy with a privileged and complacent section
of the upper middle class, a social category that includes the trade union
bureaucracy.
Establishment liberalism is concerned about lifestyle issues and identity
politics, but is utterly distant from the needs of the working people who are
the vast majority of the population. It has moved so far to the right that
the economic program of Obama and that of the incoming House Speaker John
Boehner and the Republicans differs only on minor details.
Coming out of the election, Obama will renew the drive towards bipartisanship
with which he began his administration, going out of his way from the moment
of his election to rehabilitate a completely discredited Republican Party.
All the “compromises” that he proposes will amount to acceptance of
Republican demands for deeper reductions in social spending as well as
further tax cuts and other concessions to corporate interests.
Republican leader Boehner declared that his new majority in the House of
Representatives constitutes the “voice of the American people.” The truth
is that the Republican victory sets the stage for a direct confrontation
between the working class and the most reactionary sections of the American
ruling elite.
In this conflict, the working class will find a way forward only through a
resolute and implacable break with bankrupt liberalism and the Democratic
Party and the building of a new and independent mass political movement based
on a socialist program.
--
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的追尋，但，「我是要以行動愛護這塊大地，或只是要幫大地畫遺照？」
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