Oddly enough, (or maybe not so oddly) the very same kind of crisis has just arisen between politicians and teachers in my province of Ontario, Canada. It was in the news yesterday. (Note, Sawzaw: There are no Democrats in Ontario) (unless they're up here on vacation, which doesn't count). The Liberal Party of Canada is in power at the moment in this province. They're sort of vaguely like the Democrats, only usually not so far to the Right, I'd say. Anyway, the Liberal Premier of Ontario, Dalton McGinty, is at war with the teachers and some other unions right now, because he just passed legislation freezing their wages at present levels and denying them their constitutional rights to go on strike for the next 2 years.

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From the news today:

The premier reminded them their "beef" is with the Liberal government and not students in classrooms.

"Teachers can do whatever they want, of course, at election time. What I'm saying is let's save it for election time," he said.

It was his first media availability since his minority Liberals joined forces with the Progressive Conservatives Tuesday to ram through legislation freezing teachers' wages, banning strikes for two years, cutting sick days in half to 10 annually, and ending the practice of banking sick days to cash them out upon retirement.

In response, some 136,000 Elementary Teachers Federation of Ontario and Ontario Secondary School Teachers' Federation members have launched a one-day protest across the province.

They're refusing to do voluntary extracurricular activities and high school teachers are wearing black clothes or black armbands.

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What all this amounts to is fairly simple. All the major political parties in North America have been moving sharply to the Right for the past 2 to 3 decades...basically ever since the beginning of the Reagan era. They are busting the unions, dismantling the public sector, supporting foreign intervention and foreign wars, abrogating constitutional and civil rights, reducing the tax burden on rich people (but not on other people), transferring public costs from central government to cities, towns, and municipalities (who are then forced to raise their taxes or reduce their social services...usually both), etc.

The Ontario Liberals have now adopted the general program of their primary opponents, the Conservative Party...and this will, of course, force the Conservatives to move even farther to the Right in order to seem like an alternative. ;-) The Democrats have played the same move-to-the-right game in the USA ever since the Reagan era, moving steadily to the right, and none moreso than Mr Obama, which results in the Republicans having to move SO far right to seem "different" that they have moved into positions of stark insanity.

I think all this has basically been driven by a lunatic monetary policy more than anything else. The chickens came to roost in 2008 with the financial meltdown of Wall Street's Ponzi scheme, but Bush and Obama got together and kicked the can down the road just a little bit farther with their enormous bank bailout, thus delaying the inevitable disaster a little bit longer, and in no way addressing the real problem.

What you have at the polls nowadays is nothing but parties with an extreme rightwing, bank-dominated agenda. You get to choose the one you think is not so far to the Right if you happen to be of the "liberal" persuasion, but what happens when they get in? They do what Tony Blair did, they betray you. Your fear, however, of what their conservative political opponents may do if THEY get in keeps you voting for them regardless. You'll give Obama a break if he engages in foreign wars and bails out bankers and destroys the right of habeus corpus, merely because he's not a Republican. You wouldn't give Bush or Romney that kind of break.

This is what I call "stealth" government. It pretends to be a sheep, but it's a wolf in sheep's clothing. As for the "conservative" parties, like Canada's Conservatives or the USA Republicans, they are totally obvious wolves in wolves clothing, and they make no bones about it.

Either way...you still get a wolf in power after the votes are counted. Is the wolf in sheep's clothing the "lesser evil" of the 2 wolves? Hard to say. After all, it's considerably easier for him to get away with eating the 3 Little Pigs without people raising a ruckus about it, cos he doesn't look like a wolf, and the people who support him don't necessarily notice the fangs...therefore his support base remains relatively intact (although they do get rather discouraged as time goes by).

Can you see how the Wolf Pack is getting what it wants regardless through this adversarial party system?