Angry America, Yell Louder! …………………updated

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Why Is America So Angry and Scared?

WASHINGTON (CNN) — A new national poll suggests that only a quarter of Americans think things are going well in the country today, while the rest of those questioned are angry, scared and stressed out.

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An equal portion of those polled said they are angry about the way things are going. Two-thirds of those questioned said they’re scared about the way things are going and three in four said the current conditions in the country are stressing them out.

“It’s scary how many Americans admit they are scared,” said Keating Holland, CNN’s polling director. “Americans tend to downplay the amount of fear they have when facing tough times. The fact that more than six in 10 say that they are scared shows how bad things are getting.”

“Do you feel things in this country are generally going in the right direction or do you feel things have pretty seriously gotten off on the wrong track?”

             Right         Wrong

             Direction     Track      Unsure

                %            %           %

10/10-13      7            89          4

So why is America angry and scared? They don’t know. They don’t know what has happened, they don;t know how we got here, they don’t know how to get out of this horror show they have found themselves in. (Read this!) They have been consistently programmed to believe that the elites know wtf they are doing, when in fact, they simply do not.

They have been sold an illusion, and they have bought it hook, line and sinker. They have been told, programmed, hoodwinked into believing that all they have to do is keep their heads down, work hard (which now means working far more than a 40 hour week) and the elites will take care of them. They have been convinced that they are powerless and that their betters, The Ruling Class are somehow all knowing, brilliant and beneficent and that they are a class of peons. They have been taught to bow, scrape and kowtow. They have been taught to be accepting sheep, even as they are led to the slaughter of their way of life. By those who they have been told to trust, by their betters, by their masters, by the Ruling Class. They have been kept in the dark and fed bullshit and illusions.

Pulitzer Prize winning journalist Chris Hedges, Via TocqueDeville

In his latest column, The Idiots Who Rule America, he seems to ensure that he won’t be invited back to the Council on Foreign Relations Christmas party:

   Our oligarchic class is incompetent at governing, managing the economy, coping with natural disasters, educating our young, handling foreign affairs, providing basic services like health care and safeguarding individual rights. That it is still in power, and will remain in power after this election, is a testament to our inability to separate illusion from reality.

Update:

Is this the American Dream that YOU were sold?

Washington, D.C. (AHN) – Only two of 30 nations, Mexico and Turkey, are ahead of the United States for income inequality and poverty rates, or the gap between rich and poor, according to a report released Tuesday.

The report was released by Paris-based Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development of its 30 member-nations, most of which are developed countries.

In America, the average income of the richest 10 percent of people is $93,000. When compared to purchasing power parity, it is the highest in the OECD when compared with the average of $54,000 for OECD nations.

The poorest 10 percent of Americans have an income of $5,800 per year, compared to the OECD average of $7,000.

Howie Klein, quoting Barbara Ehrenreich

Class warfare is what the wealthy and their puppets have been waging against the rest of us. One day, if unchecked, it will boil over and the McCains and Bushes and Cheneys of this country will learn what class warfare is– like the French aristocracy did. Meanwhile, perhaps they could get a glimmer from the introduction to This Land Is Your Their Land, the fantastic new book by Barbara Ehrenreich. She writes that “we’ll need a new deal, a new distribution of power and wealth if we want to restore the beautiful idea that was “America.”

 

At the pinnacles of the wealth scale, extravagance reigned on a scale not seen since the late Roman Empire. Freshly fattened CEOs, hedge fund operators, and financiers hired interior decorators for their private jets, slugged backed $10,000 martinis at the Alogonquin Hotel in Manhattan, and, in one case, stage a $2 million birthday party in Sardinia featuring an ice statue of David urinating vodka.

   There was a connection, as most people suspected, between the massive build up of wealth among the few and the anxiety and desperation of the many. The money that fueled the explosion of gluttony at the top had to come from somewhere or, more specifically, from someone. Since no domestic oil deposits had been discovered, no new seams of uranium or gold, and since the war in Iraq enriched only the military contractors and suppliers, it had to have come from other Americans. In fact, the greatest capitalist innovations of the past decade have been in the realm of squeezing money out of those who have little to spare: taking away workers’ pensions and benefits to swell profits, offering easy credit on dubious terms, raising insurance premiums and refusing to insure those who might ever make a claim, downsizing workforces to boost share prices, even falsifying time records to avoid paying overtime.

   Prosperity, in America, had not always been a zero-sum game. Early twentieth-century capitalists– who were certainly no saints– envisioned a prosperous people generating profits for the upper class by buying houses and cars and washing machines. But somewhere along the line, the ethos changed from we’re all in this together to get what you can while the getting is good. Let the environment decay, the infrastructure crumble, the public hospitals close, the schools get by on bake sales, the workers drop from exhaustion– who cares? Raise the premiums, reduce the wages, add new mystery fees to each bill, and let the devil take the hindmost. Only when the poor suckers at the bottom stopped buying and defaulted on their mortgages did anyone notice them.

Now I am by no means saying that Joe the Plumber should run America, populism has had its failures too. I am not advocating Communism or even full Socialism as a way out of this clusterfuck. If history has proven anything, it has proven that no single ideology or philosophy has ever fully worked.  That there are NO simple, single foolproof answers. I certainly don’t have THE answer, because no one has the answer. The answer will be something new, it has to be.

What we do have is a leader. Not a savior. Obama doesn’t pretend to have all the answers either. At this point, anyone who thinks that they can elect Obama and then go back to sleep and everything will be fine…is part of the problem. When Obama is elected, the real work begins. If We The People do not push him to change the country and the world into a direction and policies that benefit us, the elites will co-opt him to their benefit. It is OUR responsibility to change things by pushing him to the greatness he is capable of. ONLY with The People at his back both pushing him and defending him will Obama be able to make the changes in our society that we so obviously and desperately need. It is up to us, and we now have the means to do it and a leader who will listen. Yell if you like what he is doing and yell if you don’t. Just be sure your voice is heard.

We do not have the money or the power or the influence that the Ruling Class does to influence the direction that our world takes. All we have is our voices. Our angry voices. Now is the time to channel that anger into building our country back to the equality we once enjoyed. Now is the time to push ourselves and the Ruling Class to fully realize the potential of America that our founding fathers foresaw. Now is the time to be the change we want to see.

“Now is the time for all good men and women to come to the aid of their country”

Now is the time to make our voices heard.

Yell Louder, America.

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