The Millionaires' CLUB and The Big RENEGER; or Democrats are Toast
by Joe Palmer
[ opinion - august 10 ]
"I am opposed to millionaires, but it would be dangerous to offer me the position" - Mark Twain.
The coming autumn will see mid-term elections for the Congress of the United States, the smallest minds and the selfishest souls and the cowardliest hearts that God makes. The capitalists, investment bankers and plutocrats are doing their best to put and keep in office their own hirelings, toadies and gunsels, Nearly half the 535 senators and representatives are at least millionaires, many several times over, and each will receive only $174.000 in basic salary in 2011. They voted not to give themselves the usual raise next year out of a sense of modesty, looking ahead to the election in November. Fewer than one per cent of Americans are millionaires, and those who are relatively poor might resent a greedy Congress. Of course, as Mark Twain reminds us, "it is the foreign element that commits our crimes. There is no native criminal class except Congress."
The Democrats, the "ruling" party, had better watch out for artificially fabricated resentment towards social welfare programs in the United States, had better try to calm down the working-class outrage that is taking the form of protest against the current government and against the large numbers of mostly Unwhite (read Black and Brown) Colored voters who put that government in power. Through personal attacks, slander, and innuendo, the same Ronald Reagan puppet masters are bound to vote President Obama and the Democrats out of their majority position.
An explosion of sources of "information" both reliable and specious, but mostly biased opinion - from TV commentators to wing-nut blogs - tell voters what to think and do, to think vicious thoughts, and to do shameful things. A 'wing nut' has been defined as "a loud darling of cable television and talk radio whose remarks are outrageous but often serious enough not to be dismissed entirely." [NY Times, Herszenhorn]
Ignorant bigots and scheming manipulators are using racism to confuse and control the voters. In public pronouncements and TV sound bites politicians deny they are racist by including token Blacks or Latinos who assure voters they will not stand for universal health care or government controlling the banks.
The investment bankers know that trade unions, pensions, healthcare, safety, training, and unemployment compensation cost them money, so they send the work overseas where slaves are relatively inexpensive. And then the capitalist class calls it globalization, as if the New World Order were substantially different from the Third Reich as far as workers are concerned.
Because of the recession economy and unequal sharing of wealth today people feel helpless to improve their lot, and indeed they are helpless, and so they blame immigrants and colored people - the undesirables on the dole, the other voters who put the Democrats in power. Race and national origin become unconscious arguments against the government in the complaints of abused working-class people, who generalize incorrectly that colored people, natives, and immigrants are the cause of their poverty. They reason, "If they were worthwhile neighbors, why would they be confined by poverty and ordinance to living on the streets in the inner cities and on reservations, and why is the crime rate so high among them, and why must my tax money go toward supporting their lazy arses?"
They do not believe that their enemy is the rich, and the rich do not want them to know it because they can still squeeze the public for what little it has left of work and property, and, besides, they don't want to kill the goose. What would the owners do without the workers to buy what the workers make?
