A little light reading for you, this first day of July, from professor of political science at Hofstra University, David Michael Green. Okay, it's as light as lead and it's long. But it's strong. And who couldn't use a little strength right now?
How’s That Recessioney, Oily Thing Working Out For Ya?
Let's be honest: We live in stunningly, jaw-droppingly, ridiculously absurd political times.
Here's the story in a nutshell: A far-right predatory overclass has spent the last thirty years undoing the hard-fought gains of the mid-twentieth century, which had produced a robust middle class and vastly more economic and social justice in America than the country had ever known before. These regressives used every kind of deceit imaginable to persuade unsophisticated voters to choose candidates whose real agenda was to assist their plutocratic puppetmasters in fleecing the very same people who voted for them.
Such candidates ran on issues like the death penalty, immigration, bogus wars, gay marriage and abortion. But what they really were about as legislators was exporting jobs to where workers are dirt cheap and politically neutered, crashing organized labor, shifting the tax burden onto the mass public, deregulating industry to allow unhindered profit-taking on the upside and socialized public responsibility for risk on the downside, and locking in a Supreme Court majority that would never blanch at even the most outrageous rulings enhancing corporate power in American society.
If the product of this slow and silent coup wasn't so bloody and so ruinous to so many lives, you'd really have to hand it to these guys for their political acumen and patience. It took a while, and it required the building of a broad and robust infrastructure, spanning from mainstream media to talk radio and TV to think-tanks to Congress, the presidency and the judiciary, to the GOP and now to the Democratic Party as well, but they have pretty much completely succeeded in grabbing all the levers of power in our society.
How on earth did this happen? continue reading
Go ahead, find out how, then run outside and seize the day - it's a sunny one!
Postscript:
Apparently one of your fellow followers saw this, got mad and took off. heh. Well it makes me mad too. It should. Time to get mad and yell like hell...
