Wednesday, December 4, 2013

As the Cookie Crumbles: Help-less-ness



Prez. LowBar today (Wednesday) gave a speech in which he described income inequality in the USofA as 'the defining problem' of the current period.
APART from the fact that he's dreadfully, and probably fatally, wrong--CLIMATE CHANGE IS THE DEFINING ISSUE OF THIS WHOLE EPOCH--Aside from that, ya gotta admit, that there Prez LowBar, he gives purty good speech.
But, of course, that's just about ALL he can do about it.
Govt spending is down, govt hiring is non-existent, and wages are frozen. Departmental budgets are gutted by the sequester, jobs go unfilled, programs wither, and the House isn't gonna open the exchequer...
That's WHY he can give so rousing an address about it.
But way down, he knows (and I hope it eats at him) that ANY initiative he proposed which set out to actually rectify or specifically dispel income inequalities would IMMEDIATELY be MIS-characterized and LOUDLY condemned by the White/Right/Teahadists as "nothin' but blatant give-away to "HIS" people," aka "thim dam, lazy, shif'less, fornicatin' nigras!"
Any such proposal would, as such, be DOA--Dead on Announcement--in the House, and only slightly healthier in the Senate.
Such is the influence, still, of the Bagger Bloc. It is undiminished by recent events and/or apparent set-backs. It still commands both an outlandish share of press attention and of political influence.
A bitto history: The Bagger leadership, the money, comes from the right-wing, business/oligarch class, people allied and/or affiliated with the Olins, the Coors, the Kochs, et al. The rank-and-file Baggers, on the other hand, are the remnants and the political descendants of the the "Raygoon Democrats."
The Raygoon Dims were mainly white, center-right, working class folks who read and perfectly understood the subliminal, racially coded signals the GOPhux campaign was sending by holding its first official campaign event of 1980 in Philadelphia, MS, where 16 years before, the KKKlan had murdered three civil rights organizers and buried their bodies in a dam. Mississippi Burning, anyone?
The signal Raygoon and the GOPhux sent and the signal the racially disaffected Dims read was that civil rights movement was as dead as those three "troublemakers,"and the days of giving "them damn mahnorities everythin' they demanded" were over.
That set well with a LOT of lower class, low status white voters, who flocked to the Raygoon standard. That was the signal which set off the "Great Defection" in 1980, which broke the old FDR coalition. It signalled the onset of the systematic roll-back of all the "liberal" social gains of the previous 50 years. It's influences and consequences are still potent even today.
We can discuss 'em further when I see you at the beach...Paz, chers...
http://youtu.be/Baf2cax-1gI

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