The Template

What an interesting two weeks since Election Day. Since Mercury stationing retrograde Nov. 6, and with Mercury square Neptune, President Barack Obama was re-elected by a resounding electoral and sizable popular vote majority. Senate Democrats increased their majority while House Republicans by and large kept theirs. In his continuing campaign to be even more of a detestable dick than he was during the campaign, Mitt Romney proclaimed that to be a successful vote-getting Democrat, you need to bribe voters with “gifts” like dental care and college financial aid.

The consequences of the 2012 election are beginning to poke their little pointed heads out of the ground, and I am myself cavorting happily on a big fluffy bed of schadenfreude.

The ‘job creators’ who went all in to purchase Mitt Romney’s presidency have gone to Plan B. In light of Obama’s re-election — a mandate for Obamacare and tax fairness — they’re taking their resentment and anxiety about the anticipated reduction of their profits out on their employees and their unions. So begins the Wagnerian opera about the inevitable end of the 10-year-long Bush-era tax cuts, the 30-year jihad of de-regulated corporations, and the uber-rich turning government guns on the poor and working classes.

We could be looking at the beginning of a national health care system and a more equitable, compassionate nation. Because of that, it looks like there is some karma coming. Some of the mighty are already fighting it, kicking and clawing.

Three BP employees have been indicted by the Department of Justice on charges of manslaughter and obstruction of justice, and the company was fined $4.5 billion dollars — the largest fine in history — for the eleven fatalities and ensuing massive environmental destruction from the 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil rig explosion in the Gulf of Mexico.

Denny’s, Aetna Inc., Papa John’s and Walmart have drawn their respective lines in the sand in an attempt to leverage upcoming talks with the President on finding solutions to the ‘fiscal cliff’. These same ‘citizens’ coming to the summit are threatening price increases on their consumers, reducing worker hours and salaries, cutting positions, closing plants and blaming the unions for their businesses’ failures, because they would have to start paying more taxes and use some of their profits to pay for Obamacare for their employees.

The CEO of Aetna Inc. said, “The American people are going to suffer because we’ll lay them off — because we know how to respond to these kinds of situations.” If by “these kinds of situations” AETNA’s CEO means he’s willing to wage war against the government using the people as his pawns, remember Aetna Inc. is one of the largest health care insurance companies in the world. Papa John’s pizza whined it will have to lay off workers, reduce wages, and charge customers more because of Obamacare. How they think their comments will get any sympathy from a thinking American populace, who are sick to death of how these vultures prey on the rest of us, gives us pause for wonder.

I hope Obama knows what he’s doing, inviting these bubble-bred foxes to the hen house. He better not buy the extortion attempts. He needs to remember he can still look over his shoulder to see Joe Biden whipping up populist outcry in the heartland, while Harry Reid corrals and focuses a new Senate majority in 2013. As I have said before in 2008, 2009, 2010 and now say again in 2012, with great glee: “Time to pay your motherfucking taxes, bitches.”

Signs and portents. Something is in the air. Recently, California passed Proposition 30, which in effect is the matter to the anti-matter of Proposition 13 — the Jarvis Gann Tax Revolt of the late 1970s that took over the nation, swelling into the peak of the Reagan Revolution. Proposition 30 allows the state government to raise sales tax by a quarter percent for seven years and increases state income taxes on those making over $250,000. This will enable the state to pay for its public education system, stemming teacher layoffs and enforced furlough days, and re-build the state’s public safety programs. With every year of climate-related drought and deluge, every little bit will help.

Fourteen days, and we’re not even at the end of the 13th baktun of the Mayan calendar. There is a cracking of the old foundation holding up what we were, and it’s happening from the bottom up. That foundation holding us up was also holding us back.

We’ve all seen how the roots of a growing tree can upend a concrete sidewalk. That kind of upending does not happen overnight, but is the product of patient growth, shock, trauma and the re-invigoration that is part of nature and life on this planet. Using that metaphor in political real time, we know we can’t always see a large scale social and political movement happen directly — that goes for both conservatives and progressives. A movement is larger than one person, party or state. It is a phenomenon that takes intent, then form and then realized shape to burst through. Something happens when people say ‘enough’ and mean it, and then our elections become a living, breathing example of powerful human intent.

It takes years for a tree to push its taproot down below so its branches can grow upwards, and it takes years for a new movement, like a tree, to grow and spread. It will take years of energy and a lot of diligence for a new movement to grow and mature. Much has flowered since the Sixties and the conservative decades that followed, and the cycles continue to turn, turning over and under the old for the new and the next.

We were once the old template of ideas and were turned over. Now the template that had followed us is turned over for a new template rising, in a new form, and with greater urgency. It is time to nurture and tend to it, its form is still taking shape in the midst of distraction from the useless noise of wailing, screaming and wallowing in self pity for the presumed loss of power. Time will tell on that one. The new template is upon us. It isn’t loud or distracting, but it is here. Listen and watch for it.