johnny u January 21st, 2010 2:12 am
It's simple, folks. As soon as the economy teetered in 2008, people began having basic questions and doubts about the form of our capitalist economy. Polls then showed that a sizeable minority of voters under 30 preferred a socialist system.
What to do, then, if you're part of the capitalist elite who hears the faint hoof beats of the proletariat from somewhere out in the distance? Well, invent a white working class icon like a Joe Plumber and get him over to Uncle Rupert to give him a forum for his rants on Fox News. Poor, underachieving, and angry Joe, so typical of those right wingers who rage in the streets, decried redistributionist economics and became hugely popular among latent racists looking for a pretext to slam Obama.
Then the tea teabaggers appeared, not out of nowhere, but through the monied mediation of the elite interests that so cringed at the same sound of the distant hoof beats. The elites sensed a creeping loss in the capitalist faith, so they had to put a brake on real populism. They spent millions to organize average citizens into a venomous street army that demonized any doctrine save laissez-faire capitalism.
The tea partiers achieved their masters' aims by making it seem wrong for people to expect basic economic justice. With carefree abandon, they misused terms like socialism, fascism. dictator, and even communism. Their bombast served to divert the proletariat's mind from the true makers of the current crisis, those who would make war and money without end.
Later, Rupert Murdoch set Fox News after Acorn. Crippling Acorn's funding sources would disempower about the only institution left that can organize the poorest of Americans for their political or economic betterment. The threat of real political power in the hands of the poor when the economic system is trembling is something that Murdoch and his elite can not tolerate.
If Obama had addressed the concerns of these disgruntled folks by using his oratorical skills to put a national spotlight on where the blame belonged, then perhaps some of the unfocussed rage could have been harnessed by a true populist movement. But, Obama allowed the progressive groups that got him elected to wither through neglect, as he knew that cultivating their power after they had served his electoral purpose could check him from becoming the corporate and military headmaster that he probably planned to be all along. For that reason, he has not forged a clear line of demarcation between the forces of greed and militarism that produced the national crises and the progressive ideology that could defeat faux populists and underline a new system of values and laws that would make people hope and work for a better day.
UNITY PROGRESS
This was an extra outstanding exposition that I was glad to organize into paragraphs and to which make a few grammatical corrections. I especially love this description of how and why the "tea partiers" (and Fox News) are just stooges for the rich and powerful. At one time it was the "Three Stooges", but now it's more like the 50 Million Stooges.
The above was in response to this article.
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