I’m not sure I buy all this stuff about the right wing crazies and the potential for violence and the assassination of President Obama. It kind of goes against my overall views on how the government and corporations control the population. And we should know by now that the assassination of Presidents is not done by lone crazies. Sure. there is alot of anger among the citizens, especially the rabid right. And sure, some of those rapid right are mucho nutso. Or as a truly liberal might say, they are extremely uninformed. We’ve always had wackos and always will.
But a few things give me pause about the progressives fearful response to what’s been happening, like the town hall meetings and the language from the MSM wackos like Limbaugh and Beck and Dobbs. The overall agenda of the Obama administration in foreign policy is actually extending the framework laid by the last administration. The health care debate has clearly shown the undue influence corporations, lobbies, and special interests have on the political process. And Obama cooperated in the biggest theft in world history with the “bailouts” that some estimates amount to 24 trillion dollars. While we’re talking about a health care plan that spends 700 billion over ten years.
Which leads me to John McCain. What if McCain had won. What would his first 200 days have been like? I’ve no doubt the foreign policy approach would be exactly the same. There is no way what has happened in Obama’s first 200 days would have been handled differently. The agenda against China, Russia, and Iran is set, the only question is how it would be handled at it’s extreme.
McCain promised during his campaign to make improvements in the health care system as well. His approach was using tax credits to aid the purchase of health insurance. I won’t get into the details, but suffice it to say, he also pledged to address this serious issue. Obama of course pledged much more, but in the end, would there really have been much difference?
As for the economy, I’m just guessing here, but I would bet my last paycheck that the bailouts and stimulus would have been quite similar.
So back to the fear factor of the rabid right. First, all I’ve seen is a bunch of plants and mostly older people yelling nonsensical bullshit while a politican is speaking. Nothing new there, it’s been happening since this country was being developed. That’s the right of citizens, and the game of using plants. There have been some disturbing things being said on right wing blogs and the crazy Becks, Dobbs and Limbaughs, but what else is new. They always spout their bullshit. You want to start a civil war because of those fuckers?
So what’s really going on? It doesn’t appear that the overall agenda of a Democratic administration would be any different from a Republican adminstration. Not much anyway. But if a Republican President is in charge, say Bush the younger, the rabid right is kept in check while the angry left is up in arms, threatening revolution. And now that a Democratic President is in charge, the progressives are kept in check while the angry right is up in arms, threatening revolution. It appears however, the angry left is still the angry left, and good for us.
Divide and Conquer? I think when it comes to the very top levels of government, the agenda is the same and the divide and conquer route must be a practiced ploy. It’s too old, well known, and effective to not be used presently as well. We use torture just as was done in the Medieval Ages, before and after, so why not the other well worn methods.
The fact is there are alot of very confused and angry people in this country. Most really don’t understand the what’s, why’s and how’s of the issues. They are operating on emotion and what information is fed to them from the MSM. But they are Americans. Many have been veterans. Many have had relatives die for this country. Are we to hold their ignorance against them or help them? Should we fear our fellow Americans or try to embrace them, understand them, and educate them?
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And since Obama has so much across-the-board support, they have to go after the real crazies and get them riled up in order for their to be any division to speak of.
So they get them all riled up, and they make the rest of us, especially us, think that the real problem we’ve got facing us is THEM. And not the true powers that be, and those who are actually running things.
That’s just the 101 of it.
What is so unusual here is the way in which the big media corporations, in plain view of the world, are so brazenly, openly, behind all of this.
I mean, it used to be to find a guy like Glenn Beck you’d have to hit the public-access stations at like 2 in the morning, and he’d be some ranting withered nutjob with bad hair, bad makeup and bad lighting. Now he’s got his own slickly produced show on an enormous national network bankrolled by a huge international publicly-traded corporation.
It’s just unreal, surreal, bizarroville.
And these big public corporations seem to have no qualms whatsoever about taking what would seem to be a major PR risk in having one of their nutjob talkingheads actually incite someone to horrific violence. The monumental irresponsibility of that, in a corporation where nobody makes a MOVE without checking with a building of LAWYERS, the downright premeditation of it, consequences be DAMNED, is what really blows my mind here.
I have to say I have never wanted to move out of this country more than I do now. I saw Obama for what he was, but I really thought that the Bush years were an abberation, a mistake, something that was going to be somewhat corrected, something we’d all feel bad about, how could we not?
But no, it just set the stage for even worse, more abominable human behavior. Now the wars are just GREAT, they’re all justified, don’t ya know, babies being slaughtered, American troops being slaughtered, well it’s just GREAT now because, well, we got rid of that awful Bush guy, so it MUST be okay! And we’re all being robbed blind by a bunch of banksters who have their representatives in the highest positions in government, right there in the Treasury Department and at the Fed, and we just let them go right on ahead doing that because by golly, things are BETTER now, they HAVE to be, we got rid of that Bush guy, right!? Right!
We’ve gone from hopeful to abysmally hopeless in a matter of months. It’s become depressingly clear that nothing in this country is changing, nobody is really interested in changing anything, they’re all just looking for the next bubble they can manipulate until it pops, they’re just figuring out how they can rip off another generation of workers in some other country preferably because all the workers HERE have been sucked completely dry, so let’s start working on those “emerging markets”, we’re gonna just let this country rot away while we go unleash the dogs of capitalism on new unsuspecting populations who haven’t yet been seduced with all the shiny stuff …..
We’re being told we’re in a “recovery” while everybody I know is just dying, and I mean seriously just fucked more than I’ve ever seen in my 47 years on this earth, just the most godawful depression of my LIFETIME, and we’re told oh, it’s all good, we’ve hit bottom even though we can’t point to any evidence that says it’s not just gonna drop over the cliff again THIS October, but “TRUST US” we’re telling you the worst is here and it can only get better.
How? By going back to buying McMansions and remodeling our homes with home equity loans? By running up more credit cards?
There’s no “there” there. There’s nothing. There’s nothing to base an economy on. At all.
…by your own and your neighbors’ situations. Wall Street – which, after all, is the government – measures economic indicators differently than we do. For them it’s a good thing when unemployment goes up, because that means the price of labor goes down. For them it’s a good thing when people and businesses default on their loans, because they can be repaid by the taxpayers at the calculated total rate of projected ‘loss’ instead of what they would have earned from the person or business if the loan hadn’t defaulted. The worse the conditions are for Main Street, the better for Wall Street. Just look at it through your super ‘Bizarro-World’ decoder glasses and it’ll all start making sense.
You won’t like it, but you will begin to understand how things really work. ยง;o)
… no. A McCain stimulus package would not have been the same. There would have been far more tax cuts, focused at the top of the income ladder, less grants to states, less investment in infrastructure. Less stimulus.
Lots of pork larded into the bill to get it through, but every prospect of being flipped the other way around … $500b in tax cuts, and targeted on the least effective tax cuts, and $300b in spending, for a stimulus impact of under $200b a year over three years, and unemployment would still have been rising this month.
Since, after all, the stimulus package that was passed is not what the corporations in the Republican wing of the Corporate Party would have passed if they had had their way.
And the worst of the five health car bills passed out of committee is better than the starting point of the McCain proposal, and we can be confident that it would also have been pushed in the direction of the interests of insurance and pharma corporations.
The different wings of the Corporate Party are different, they have a different approach, and the country is far better served by having the fascist wing out of power. It would be a silly unrealistic fantasy to expect that a Democrat who ran as a representative of the moderate wing of the corporate party to govern as a progressive populist … but if the corporations backing the fascist wing were getting everything they wanted, they would not be organizing the brown shirts to get into the fray.
Of course, if progressives are kept in check, its because we are checking ourselves with unrealistic fantasies that a President from the moderate wing of the Corporate Party is in fact on “our side”. With the possible exception of the social liberalism that the moderate wing of the Corporate Party tends to favor – and even that is on the table as a bargaining chip – he will only be on “our side” to the extent that we force him to be.
Which means primarying enough Democratic Congresspersons to be able to force the issue when its important.