Voting Against Our Own Interests

To the Editor:

Repercussions of the 2010 national, state, and gubernatorial election results: Americans voting against their own interests and well being.

The most glaring example of public remorse toward their newly elected Republican governors and state legislators have been demonstrated in states like Wisconsin, Michigan, Ohio, Florida, and, most recently, New Jersey, where public union bargaining rights have been stripped and where middle class public workers, in addition, have been imposed greater contributions in their pension and health benefits. Their candidacy includes hidden agendas, which, when enacted, caused outrage among the majority of the electorate.

The strategy being played out is a well-calculated one by the Republican National Committee and its benefactors.

In the 2010 elections, of the ten major campaign financing organizations, three were Democratic and seven were Republican.

The three were national unions representing mainly millions of public workers with their individual contributions and well-organized grass roots “get out the vote” efforts.

The seven comprised of the US Chamber of Commerce and two of Carl Rove’s. American Crossroads and Crossroads GPS, among others, where donors were a few undisclosed multimillionaires and billionaires.

The Democrats in that race were outspent by well over 100 percent, and the outcome was predictable.

The Supreme Court in the “Citizen United” case which allowed unlimited campaign financing by corporations, overturned legislative and Supreme Court precedent since Voting Rights Act of 1965, and opened the floodgates for corporate control of elections at the federal and state level.

The Republican strategy, fueled primarily by the Koch brothers, multibillionaires who inherited the fortune and still very profitable in oil production and oil refineries located in several states of the United States.

These two tycoons, politically active for decades, founders of Americans for Prosperity, an extreme tea party activist group, and other Republican organizations, along with Carl Rove, the NRC and other king makers in and outside Washington, concluded that of the three remaining national unions, the only Democratic supports, were systematically dismantled, the Republicans, with the support of a few big donors, would decimate the Democratic campaign system and overwhelmingly dominate future elections.

The Republications, with the overwhelming superiority in campaign financing, can be brash enough to enact or propose draconian measures that decimate the poor, the middle class, and the economy, while enriching corporations and the rich.

We are presently witnessing a public backlash to these draconian initiatives and mandates at the state and federal level (i.e., union stripping and major education attritions at the state level, and the US Representative Paul Ryan budget plan passed unanimously by all Republican House of Representatives and nearly unanimously by the US Republican Senate designed to dismantle Medicare and render Medicaid effectively unenforceable).

Only the outcome of the 2012 elections will reveal if money and Republican deplorable policies and hidden agendas will prevail and whether low and mid-prosperous Americans will once again be deluded to vote against their interest and well-being.

Peter L. Alagna

55 Head of Meadow Road, Newtown                                July 9, 2011