Of Demagogues and Demigods; Of Charlatans, and Sheep

Just ahead lies the abyss, we are told. We are offered a way back, a hand to guide us away. We must seek out the foul perpetrator of our current malaise. We must pursue him into the grave, exhume him, repudiate him and abandon that which he set in place as he saved Capitalism from devouring itself. The demagogues of the right, he of the fat head, and his disciples, wish that the noble Roosevelt (at this point either one suffices as an enemy of the right) arise, renounce his egalitarian deeds and expunge them from the national consciousness before retreating to his grave. The odious Limbaugh says, "Roosevelt is dead. His policies may live on, but we're in the process of doing something about that as well."

Yes, we're doing something about his policies. If we follow the radical elements of the Republican Party, a.k.a. Teabaggers,we'll be desiccating the fields that allowed a social safety net to be woven, a net which protects us from the inevitable vicissitudes of life, which, sans Social Security and Medicare, would now include the market-borne ravages of old age, infirmity, and poverty: a shrinking middle class, diminished educational opportunities and a general de-lustering of the "American Dream" . We're throwing American jobs overboard with both hands as we seek to enrich "shareholder value" by freezing costs through near-slave wages overseas while letting profits rise here. The sky's the limit on profit when the cost of labor is debased to Chinese, Vietnamese, Singaporean levels, but the sale price here is what the market will bear.

Goods manufactured in low wage countries are often of inferior quality. A cynic may propose that reservations to buy such schlock may be overcome if the wages of Americans, the top of the class in the consumer universe, are retarded by union busting, fear, and further job propulsion away from our shores. Then shoppers are forced to buy as cheap as it comes, because that's all they can afford. All according to plan in a society where the bar is always lowered for the poor and middle class as the sights of corporate movers and shakers are always raised.

Again to the precipice. We face a crisis. Obama has ruined the country. We should never have allowed such as him to occupy the White House. Yet wasn't this man dealt a royal flush of woes? His predecessor inherited a surplus. Obama is handed the wheel by the drunken teenager who has steered the car toward a cliff; each wheel looser than when he pulled the car out of the driveway. The first thing to do when the surplus was booked was to excuse those who paid taxes during the boom years--strike one against fiscal sanity. The second thing was to chase a phantom into the quagmire of war with all such expenditures "off the books"--strike two against fiscal sanity. He also added corporate apologists to the Supreme Court, who have upheld business interests over citizens' interest and rights. One of the most egregious and long-reaching is the Citizens United case which bestows rights upon corporations that are super-human, and for which mere human powers are no equal--strike three. You're out. Next batter. Oh yeah, bottom of the ninth, you're down 14 trillion to 0.

Within the confines of the asylum, Cheney asserted that,Reagan proved "deficits don't matter." Ask Eric Cantor if that view still holds sway. Obama addressed the peculiar book keeping tricks which kept Bush's wars "off the books", so now he is saddled with the responsibility of being a responsible executive, wishing the bills weren't there doesn't mean they aren't due.

As the country, thanks to illegal, orgiastic behavior by the country's bankers, sank into something which smelled a bit like a depression, steps were taken to save one of the largest, if not the largest, manufacturing components of the U.S. economy, the auto industry. In retrospect the Teabaggers say it should have been allowed to fail. That element of the Republican Party truly has a death wish. And it's not a wish directed at itself, it is, rather, directed at the middle class, by depriving those slackers of: universal education, publicly-funded health care, a decent job with rising expectations for workers and their families, clean air and water, reasonable protection against usurious banking practices, and a world whose priorities are not driven by fear.

The greatest mystery to me as that the Tea Party and its devoteas are, by and large, members of the very class they are working to undermine. They see nothing wrong with being led by the Koch brothers, Karl Rove, Limbaugh/Beck et.al.,Grover Norquist, Rupert Murdoch and Fox News as those thugs seek to build a society in which the rich get richer and the devil take the hindmost.