By Gloria Dulan-Wilson Hello All: A friend of mine emailed an article on equality in America to my attention that I thought would definitely be of interest and value to us all, so I'm reposting it here on my Blog. It gives even more merit to the efforts of Rev. Jesse Jackson to bring equality to the Black community, so much so, that I'm posting it in its entirety, without any additional commentary. Stay Blessed & ECLECTICALLY BLACK Gloria Dulan-Wilson
We Are the Most Unequal Society in the Developed World
November 10, 2014 |
The American people have spoken. But what did we really say about inequality?
At
first glance, it seems that extreme inequality mattered little to the
majority of voters who put pro-business candidates into office. After
all, the Republicans, along with far too many Democrats, are certain to
cater to their Wall Street/CEO donors. Do Americans really want an
ever-rising gap between the super-rich and the rest of us?
An important study ("How Much (More) Should CEOs Make? A Universal Desire for More Equal Pay"[3])
by Sorapop Kiatpongsan and Michael I. Norton provides insight on why
Americans aren't more upset about rising inequality: It shows we are
clueless about how bad it really is. Their analysis of a 2009
international survey of 55,187 people from 40 countries found that when
it comes to understanding the severity of inequality, we're the most
clueless of all.
Americans are virtually blind to the growing gap
between CEO pay and the pay of the average worker. As the chart below
shows that gap has increased dramatically. In 1965, for every dollar
earned by the average worker, CEOs earned $20. By 2012, that gap
mushroomed to 354 to one.
For every dollar earned by an average worker, the CEO gets..
Photo Credit:
Source: AFL-CIO, Hargreaves, Mishel & Sabadish
But,
when asked in the survey, Americans grossly underestimated this gap.
Instead of 354 to 1, the Americans in representative survey think it is
only 30 to 1. When asked what the ideal pay gap should be, Americans say
that a fair gap would be about 7 to 1.
More amazing still, the
survey results, combined for all countries, show that the misperception
of inequality doesn't significantly vary by age, gender, income,
political leanings or education.
To see if these finding also hold
for the U.S., I waded into the database: Does political affiliation and
education impact how the 1,581 Americans in the survey estimated the
wage gap? (The data comes from the International Social Survey
Programme: Social Inequality IV - ISSP 2009 on the website Gesis[4]. )
Americans estimate what the CEO/Worker pay Gap actually is,
and what it should be.
Photo Credit:
International Social Survey Programme: Social Inequality IV - ISSP 2009
As the chart above shows, "Strong Democrats" estimated that the actual
ratio between a CEO of a large corporation and an unskilled factory
worker was about 36 to 1. "Strong Republicans" said it was 40 to 1. A
difference without a distinction.
When it comes to offering opinions about what the wage gap shouldbe,
the Strong Democrats thought 5 to 1 was about right, while the Strong
Republicans thought it should be about 12 to 1. The two political
extremes obviously are much closer to each other than to the current
reality of 354 to 1. Does education make a difference?
The
data also allowed us to compare those who didn't finish high school
with those with graduate degrees. Lo and behold both groups again were
closer to each other, and again were wildly off the mark. Those who
didn't finish school thought the actual gap was 60 to 1 while those with graduate degrees thought it was about 40 to 1.
Those
who didn't complete high school thought the ideal pay gap should be
about 5 to 1, while those with graduate degrees offered 12 to 1, ratios
were identical to those offered by the Strong Democrats and Republicans.
When
it comes to our ignorance of the pay gap, there are no blue states, no
red states—only misinformed states of mind. We're the know-nothings of
inequality. Why are we so blind to inequality?
Most
of us have no idea that our golden land of opportunity is the runaway
leader among developed nations when it comes to inequality (see chart below[5]).
This dubious distinction runs counter to American Dream we've been
indoctrinated with since birth. As a result, we reflexively think that
America is the epitome of democracy -- the fairest, most just and most
upwardly mobile country in history. That makes it hard for us to account
for why we are more unequal than all these other countries. So I
suspect many of us just tune out the data. It's too jarring to the
deep-seated doctrines that comprise our national identity.
It pays to be a CEO in the U.S.
Photo Credit:
How Much (More) CEOs Make?
Our
misreading of inequality also may be a legacy of the post-WWII economic
boom. During that time, our working class had the highest global
standard of living with ever increasing yearly real wages. (Please see my last post[6].)
In the heat of the Cold War, it was American policy to boost jobs and
incomes to make sure our workers and middle class were the envy of the
world. If you add in the late New Deal and WWII into the mix, we're
looking at more than a half century of rising prosperity for working
people. Also during this period income taxes on the wealthy were
extremely high, more than 90% on the highest bracket during WWII. As a
result the top one percent, while living extremely well, saw their share
of total U.S. wealth decline (see chart below[7]).
Little
wonder, that the massive baby boomer generation grew up both with the
idea of relatively equality and the reality of it. Of course, there were
wealthy people all over America, but life was getting better and better
for the vast majority of Americans.
We may still be living with
this cultural hangover and operating from a societal self-image from
yesteryear. We are likely to cling to it for quite awhile, in part,
because it's comforting as new economic insecurities take hold. As
workers from other nations pass us by, we look in the mirror and still
hope we are the fairest of them all. Both political parties refuse to address inequality
Perhaps
the biggest reason we are so misinformed stems from the failure of both
parties, especially the Democrats, to address rising inequality in a
meaningful way. Yes, the Democrats tend to support modest rises in the
minimum wage that indeed make a difference to those stuck in the
lowest-paying jobs. But they won't go near the revolutionary idea of
placing a legal limit on what the CEO/worker pay gap should be -- let's
say at 12 to 1 which the Strong Republicans and the well-educated favor.
The reason is obvious: Politicians live in fear of a different
revolution -- a massive revolt from their corporate donors, who wouldn't
dream of earning so little. In fact, the entire elite establishment --
in finance, in the corporate world, in the higher levels of government,
academia and the media have no intention of limiting their incomes, no
matter what the public believes to be just and fair. Here lies the very
essence of class struggle between the 99 percent and 1 percent, and both
parties want no part of it. What will it take to wake us up to inequality?
The
good news is that Americans of all genders, shades, incomes, education
and politics think on average that the wage gap should be about 7 to 1,
not 354 to one. That's a heck of a good place to start. Imagine if the
only real economic debate was between the strong Democrats who thought a
fair wage gap should be 5 to 1 versus the strong Republicans who
thought it should be 12 to 1. Progressives should be able to build upon
this shared sense of basic fairness, one that is miles apart from what
elites expect and feel is their due.
For about six months Occupy
Wall Street touched this nerve and put inequality on the agenda. "We are
the 99 percent" became our national anthem. For the first time in a
generation the country was talking about the gap between super-rich
financiers and the rest of us.
Roughly at the same time, the Tea
Party emerged with a different message. They also sensed that something
was profoundly wrong. For them the problem is government. They're not
concerned with inequality. If they see it at all, they follow Ayn Rand
and blame it on those at the bottom for not working hard enough. They,
and their political allies, revel in talk about "takers and makers" to
explain away the growing and glaring economic disparities.
Occupy
disappeared. (Yes, they are still doing good work here and there.) We no
longer have 900 encampments around the world to remind everyone that
inequality is our new way of life. But something still is stirring at
the bottom. Minimum wage campaigns are succeeding even in Red states.
The quest for $15 per hour pay for low-wage workers is growing. And most
importantly, each day millions more face the stark reality of trying to
lead a decent life on low-pay and porous benefits with blatant
inequality all around.
Elites and their academic acolytes will
counter by blaming inequality on advanced technology and the lack of
education. The poor can make it if only more elite colleges admitted
them, if only charter schools replaced tenure-saddled public schools, if
only the teachers unions disappeared. Only then will inequality be
reduced as those at bottom get more degrees and advanced skills.
To
be sure, the "help-thyself" message has resonance, and access to more
education will certainly help. But it leaves in place the powerful
structures of elite economic domination. It will take a different kind
of education to reduce the wage gap. We will need to learn the skills of
building a mass movement, that starts by providing education on the
realities of growing inequality. Only then can we can break through the
faulty self-image of America that is crippling us. Spreading the word
can really make a real difference. It's something we all can do.
We are the most unequal society in the developed world, and it doesn't have to be that way.
Links: [1] http://alternet.org
[2] http://www.alternet.org/authors/les-leopold
[3] http://www.hbs.edu/faculty/Publication%20Files/Kiatpongsan%20Norton%20PPS_dae93595-5382-4ab6-99f7-24329c8c0c33.pdf
[4] http://zacat.gesis.org/webview/index.jsp?object=http://zacat.gesis.org/obj/fStudy/ZA5400
[5]
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2014/09/25/the-pay-gap-between-ceos-and-workers-is-much-worse-than-you-realize/
[6] http://www.alternet.org/labor/sneaky-ways-employers-are-stealing-our-wages?paging=off¤t_page=1#bookmark
[7] http://aaronlayman.com/2014/03/thomas-piketty-emmanuel-saez-consequences-of-wealth-inequality-forces-of-divergence/
[8] mailto:corrections@alternet.org?Subject=Typo on We Are the Most Unequal Society in the Developed World
[9] http://www.alternet.org/tags/inequality
[10] http://www.alternet.org/tags/income
[11] http://www.alternet.org/tags/ceos
[12] http://www.alternet.org/tags/pay-gap-0
[13] http://www.alternet.org/tags/workers
[14] http://www.alternet.org/tags/wage
[15] http://www.alternet.org/tags/wealthy
[16] http://www.alternet.org/tags/rich
[17] http://www.alternet.org/tags/poor-0
[18] http://www.alternet.org/%2Bnew_src%2B
NOW THAT YOU KNOW, WHAT ARE YOU GOING TO DO ABOUT IT? PUSH, NOT ONLY FOR AN INCREASE IN THE MINIMUM WAGE, BUT TO BRING THOSE OF US WHO ARE IN THE MIDDLE TO CLOSER PROXIMITY IN SALARY RANGE WITH THE CEO'S - AND MORE TAX CONSEQUENCES ACROSS THE BOARD. Stay Blessed & ECLECTICALLY BLACK Gloria
Now, I didn't write this article. It was forwarded to me by one of my favorite blog-sisters, Eduadvocate. It is, however, so full of information, and so compelling a blue print as to why we have to get our acts together, and be both on the offensive and defensive, not only in reference to this upcoming re-election, but throughout the entire year, that I had to put it out here. You need to read it all, take notes, and begin to strategize what we can do individually and collectively to save ourselves and our country. And, yes,I said our country - for our cynical friends who have a problem with that, unless you've made definite plans to move permanently out of the USA, this, for all intents and purposes is our country. And WE, THE PEOPLE, Black, white, blue green and purple, are under seige by the rapacious rep-ugh-blicans who mean us absolutely no good. This article came out prior to the massive Occupy Wall Street movement. As more and more Americans wake up to this nightmare, and more and more Occupy movements form, I want to make sure that you are occupying the correct perpetrators - so that there is no knee jerk occupy copy cat against the wrong people - like the idiocy that wanted to demonstrate against President Obama in Harlem in front of the Apollo. Clearly clueless as to what the real deal is, and where these actions should be appropriately directed. At the same time, Democrats must step up their game and stop trying to appear to be Mr. and Ms. Nice person. We need to relanguage what we are about so people really get the message.
So read, and respond. We've got a lot to do to make sure that we don't let this information go to waste, and that we don't all end up on some soup and bread line somewhere, while they and their cronies live in these high rise, ugly assed glass houses that have been constructed to tower over us here in New York, a symbol of their disdain for those of us who work (or try to) every day and raise our families in the middle of this madness.
As you watch the Rep-ugh-blican clown show evolve on national TV, remember one of those clowns could end up being the president if we don't do our job, and VOTE.
Not only that, if you don't support those who are running for office in opposition to their oppressive ways, we will still not have delivered the goods we need to make American humane again.
Read the following and be afraid, be very afraid (if you thought Vampires were scary, check out the real ones below):
This work by Truthout is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 3.0 United States License. Goodbye to All That: Reflections of a GOP Operative Who Left the Cult Saturday 3 September 2011 by: Mike Lofgren, Truthout | News Analysis
The article opens with two quotes from a movie entitled "Double Indemnity" (1944) Barbara Stanwyck: "We're both rotten!" Fred MacMurray: "Yeah - only you're a little more rotten."
Those lines of dialogue from a classic film noir sum up the state of the two political parties in contemporary America. Both parties are rotten - how could they not be, given the complete infestation of the political system by corporate money on a scale that now requires a presidential candidate to raise upwards of a billion dollars to be competitive in the general election? Both parties are captives to corporate loot. The main reason the Democrats' health care bill will be a budget buster once it fully phases in is the Democrats' rank capitulation to corporate interests - no single-payer system, in order to mollify the insurers; and no negotiation of drug prices, a craven surrender to Big Pharma.
But both parties are not rotten in quite the same way. The Democrats have their share of machine politicians, careerists, corporate bagmen, egomaniacs and kooks. Nothing, however, quite matches the modern GOP.
To those millions of Americans who have finally begun paying attention to politics and watched with exasperation the tragicomedy of the debt ceiling extension, it may have come as a shock that the Republican Party is so full of lunatics. To be sure, the party, like any political party on earth, has always had its share of crackpots, like Robert K. Dornan or William E. Dannemeyer. But the crackpot outliers of two decades ago have become the vital center today: Steve King, Michele Bachman (now a leading presidential candidate as well), Paul Broun, Patrick McHenry, Virginia Foxx, Louie Gohmert, Allen West. The Congressional directory now reads like a casebook of lunacy.
It was this cast of characters and the pernicious ideas they represent that impelled me to end a nearly 30-year career as a professional staff member on Capitol Hill. A couple of months ago, I retired; but I could see as early as last November that the Republican Party would use the debt limit vote, an otherwise routine legislative procedure that has been used 87 times since the end of World War II, in order to concoct an entirely artificial fiscal crisis. Then, they would use that fiscal crisis to get what they wanted, by literally holding the US and global economies as hostages.
The debt ceiling extension is not the only example of this sort of political terrorism. Republicans were willing to lay off 4,000 Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) employees, 70,000 private construction workers and let FAA safety inspectors work without pay, in fact, forcing them to pay for their own work-related travel - how prudent is that? - in order to strong arm some union-busting provisions into the FAA reauthorization.
Everyone knows that in a hostage situation, the reckless and amoral actor has the negotiating upper hand over the cautious and responsible actor because the latter is actually concerned about the life of the hostage, while the former does not care. This fact, which ought to be obvious, has nevertheless caused confusion among the professional pundit class, which is mostly still stuck in the Bob Dole era in terms of its orientation. For instance, Ezra Klein wrote of his puzzlement over the fact that while House Republicans essentially won the debt ceiling fight, enough of them were sufficiently dissatisfied that they might still scuttle the deal. Of course they might - the attitude of many freshman Republicans to national default was "bring it on!"
It should have been evident to clear-eyed observers that the Republican Party is becoming less and less like a traditional political party in a representative democracy and becoming more like an apocalyptic cult, or one of the intensely ideological authoritarian parties of 20th century Europe. This trend has several implications, none of them pleasant.
In his "Manual of Parliamentary Practice," Thomas Jefferson wrote that it is less important that every rule and custom of a legislature be absolutely justifiable in a theoretical sense, than that they should be generally acknowledged and honored by all parties. These include unwritten rules, customs and courtesies that lubricate the legislative machinery and keep governance a relatively civilized procedure. The US Senate has more complex procedural rules than any other legislative body in the world; many of these rules are contradictory, and on any given day, the Senate parliamentarian may issue a ruling that contradicts earlier rulings on analogous cases.
The only thing that can keep the Senate functioning is collegiality and good faith. During periods of political consensus, for instance, the World War II and early post-war eras, the Senate was a "high functioning" institution: filibusters were rare and the body was legislatively productive. Now, one can no more picture the current Senate producing the original Medicare Act than the old Supreme Soviet having legislated the Bill of Rights.
Far from being a rarity, virtually every bill, every nominee for Senate confirmation and every routine procedural motion is now subject to a Republican filibuster. Under the circumstances, it is no wonder that Washington is gridlocked: legislating has now become war minus the shooting, something one could have observed 80 years ago in the Reichstag of the Weimar Republic. As Hannah Arendt observed, a disciplined minority of totalitarians can use the instruments of democratic government to undermine democracy itself.
John P. Judis sums up the modern GOP this way: "Over the last four decades, the Republican Party has transformed from a loyal opposition into an insurrectionary party that flouts the law when it is in the majority and threatens disorder when it is the minority. It is the party of Watergate and Iran-Contra, but also of the government shutdown in 1995 and the impeachment trial of 1999. If there is an earlier American precedent for today's Republican Party, it is the antebellum Southern Democrats of John Calhoun who threatened to nullify, or disregard, federal legislation they objected to and who later led the fight to secede from the union over slavery."
A couple of years ago, a Republican committee staff director told me candidly (and proudly) what the method was to all this obstruction and disruption. Should Republicans succeed in obstructing the Senate from doing its job, it would further lower Congress's generic favorability rating among the American people. By sabotaging the reputation of an institution of government, the party that is programmatically against government would come out the relative winner.
A deeply cynical tactic, to be sure, but a psychologically insightful one that plays on the weaknesses both of the voting public and the news media. There are tens of millions of low-information voters who hardly know which party controls which branch of government, let alone which party is pursuing a particular legislative tactic. These voters' confusion over who did what allows them to form the conclusion that "they are all crooks," and that "government is no good," further leading them to think, "a plague on both your houses" and "the parties are like two kids in a school yard." This ill-informed public cynicism, in its turn, further intensifies the long-term decline in public trust in government that has been taking place since the early 1960s - a distrust that has been stoked by Republican rhetoric at every turn ("Government is the problem," declared Ronald Reagan in 1980).
The media are also complicit in this phenomenon. Ever since the bifurcation of electronic media into a more or less respectable "hard news" segment and a rabidly ideological talk radio and cable TV political propaganda arm, the "respectable" media have been terrified of any criticism for perceived bias. Hence, they hew to the practice of false evenhandedness. Paul Krugman has skewered this tactic as being the "centrist cop-out." "I joked long ago," he says, "that if one party declared that the earth was flat, the headlines would read 'Views Differ on Shape of Planet.'"
Inside-the-Beltway wise guy Chris Cillizza merely proves Krugman right in his Washington Post analysis of "winners and losers" in the debt ceiling impasse. He wrote that the institution of Congress was a big loser in the fracas, which is, of course, correct, but then he opined: "Lawmakers - bless their hearts - seem entirely unaware of just how bad they looked during this fight and will almost certainly spend the next few weeks (or months) congratulating themselves on their tremendous magnanimity." Note how the pundit's ironic deprecation falls like the rain on the just and unjust alike, on those who precipitated the needless crisis and those who despaired of it. He seems oblivious that one side - or a sizable faction of one side - has deliberately attempted to damage the reputation of Congress to achieve its political objectives.
This constant drizzle of "there the two parties go again!" stories out of the news bureaus, combined with the hazy confusion of low-information voters, means that the long-term Republican strategy of undermining confidence in our democratic institutions has reaped electoral dividends. The United States has nearly the lowest voter participation among Western democracies; this, again, is a consequence of the decline of trust in government institutions - if government is a racket and both parties are the same, why vote? And if the uninvolved middle declines to vote, it increases the electoral clout of a minority that is constantly being whipped into a lather by three hours daily of Rush Limbaugh or Fox News. There were only 44 million Republican voters in the 2010 mid-term elections, but they effectively canceled the political results of the election of President Obama by 69 million voters.
This tactic of inducing public distrust of government is not only cynical, it is schizophrenic. For people who profess to revere the Constitution, it is strange that they so caustically denigrate the very federal government that is the material expression of the principles embodied in that document. This is not to say that there is not some theoretical limit to the size or intrusiveness of government; I would be the first to say there are such limits, both fiscal and Constitutional. But most Republican officeholders seem strangely uninterested in the effective repeal of Fourth Amendment protections by the Patriot Act, the weakening of habeas corpus and self-incrimination protections in the public hysteria following 9/11 or the unpalatable fact that the United States has the largest incarcerated population of any country on earth. If anything, they would probably opt for more incarcerated persons, as imprisonment is a profit center for the prison privatization industry, which is itself a growth center for political contributions to these same politicians.[1] Instead, they prefer to rail against those government programs that actually help people. And when a program is too popular to attack directly, like Medicare or Social Security, they prefer to undermine it by feigning an agonized concern about the deficit. That concern, as we shall see, is largely fictitious. Undermining Americans' belief in their own institutions of self-government remains a prime GOP electoral strategy. But if this technique falls short of producing Karl Rove's dream of 30 years of unchallengeable one-party rule (as all such techniques always fall short of achieving the angry and embittered true believer's New Jerusalem), there are other even less savory techniques upon which to fall back. Ever since Republicans captured the majority in a number of state legislatures last November, they have systematically attempted to make it more difficult to vote: by onerous voter ID requirements (in Wisconsin, Republicans have legislated photo IDs while simultaneously shutting Department of Motor Vehicles (DMV) offices in Democratic constituencies while at the same time lengthening the hours of operation of DMV offices in GOP constituencies); by narrowing registration periods; and by residency requirements that may disenfranchise university students.
This legislative assault is moving in a diametrically opposed direction to 200 years of American history, when the arrow of progress pointed toward more political participation by more citizens. Republicans are among the most shrill in self-righteously lecturing other countries about the wonders of democracy; exporting democracy (albeit at the barrel of a gun) to the Middle East was a signature policy of the Bush administration. But domestically, they don't want those people voting.
You can probably guess who those people are. Above all, anyone not likely to vote Republican. As Sarah Palin would imply, the people who are not Real Americans. Racial minorities. Immigrants. Muslims. Gays. Intellectuals. Basically, anyone who doesn't look, think, or talk like the GOP base.
This must account, at least to some degree, for their extraordinarily vitriolic hatred of President Obama. I have joked in the past that the main administration policy that Republicans object to is Obama's policy of being black.[2] Among the GOP base, there is constant harping about somebody else, some "other," who is deliberately, assiduously and with malice aforethought subverting the Good, the True and the Beautiful: Subversives. Commies. Socialists. Ragheads. Secular humanists. Blacks. Fags. Feminazis. The list may change with the political needs of the moment, but they always seem to need a scapegoat to hate and fear.
It is not clear to me how many GOP officeholders believe this reactionary and paranoid claptrap. I would bet that most do not. But they cynically feed the worst instincts of their fearful and angry low-information political base with a nod and a wink. During the disgraceful circus of the "birther" issue, Republican politicians subtly stoked the fires of paranoia by being suggestively equivocal - "I take the president at his word" - while never unambiguously slapping down the myth. John Huntsman was the first major GOP figure forthrightly to refute the birther calumny - albeit after release of the birth certificate.
I do not mean to place too much emphasis on racial animus in the GOP. While it surely exists, it is also a fact that Republicans think that no Democratic president could conceivably be legitimate. Republicans also regarded Bill Clinton as somehow, in some manner, twice fraudulently elected (well do I remember the elaborate conspiracy theories that Republicans traded among themselves). Had it been Hillary Clinton, rather than Barack Obama, who had been elected in 2008, I am certain we would now be hearing, in lieu of the birther myths, conspiracy theories about Vince Foster's alleged murder.
The reader may think that I am attributing Svengali-like powers to GOP operatives able to manipulate a zombie base to do their bidding. It is more complicated than that. Historical circumstances produced the raw material: the deindustrialization and financialization of America since about 1970 has spawned an increasingly downscale white middle class - without job security (or even without jobs), with pensions and health benefits evaporating and with their principal asset deflating in the collapse of the housing bubble. Their fears are not imaginary; their standard of living is shrinking.
What do the Democrats offer these people? Essentially nothing. Democratic Leadership Council-style "centrist" Democrats were among the biggest promoters of disastrous trade deals in the 1990s that outsourced jobs abroad: NAFTA, World Trade Organization, permanent most-favored-nation status for China. At the same time, the identity politics/lifestyle wing of the Democratic Party was seen as a too illegal immigrant-friendly by downscaled and outsourced whites.[3]
While Democrats temporized, or even dismissed the fears of the white working class as racist or nativist, Republicans went to work. To be sure, the business wing of the Republican Party consists of the most energetic outsourcers, wage cutters and hirers of sub-minimum wage immigrant labor to be found anywhere on the globe. But the faux-populist wing of the party, knowing the mental compartmentalization that occurs in most low-information voters, played on the fears of that same white working class to focus their anger on scapegoats that do no damage to corporations' bottom lines: instead of raising the minimum wage, let's build a wall on the Southern border (then hire a defense contractor to incompetently manage it). Instead of predatory bankers, it's evil Muslims. Or evil gays. Or evil abortionists.
How do they manage to do this? Because Democrats ceded the field. Above all, they do not understand language. Their initiatives are posed in impenetrable policy-speak: the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act. The what? - can anyone even remember it? No wonder the pejorative "Obamacare" won out. Contrast that with the Republicans' Patriot Act. You're a patriot, aren't you? Does anyone at the GED level have a clue what a Stimulus Bill is supposed to be? Why didn't the White House call it the Jobs Bill and keep pounding on that theme? You know that Social Security and Medicare are in jeopardy when even Democrats refer to them as entitlements. "Entitlement" has a negative sound in colloquial English: somebody who is "entitled" selfishly claims something he doesn't really deserve. Why not call them "earned benefits," which is what they are because we all contribute payroll taxes to fund them? That would never occur to the Democrats. Republicans don't make that mistake; they are relentlessly on message: it is never the "estate tax," it is the "death tax." Heaven forbid that the Walton family should give up one penny of its $86-billion fortune. All of that lucre is necessary to ensure that unions be kept out of Wal-Mart, that women employees not be promoted and that politicians be kept on a short leash.
ARE YOU LISTENING DEMOCRATS??? HELLOOOOOOO!
It was not always thus. It would have been hard to find an uneducated farmer during the depression of the 1890s who did not have a very accurate idea about exactly which economic interests were shafting him. An unemployed worker in a breadline in 1932 would have felt little gratitude to the Rockefellers or the Mellons. But that is not the case in the present economic crisis. After a riot of unbridled greed such as the world has not seen since the conquistadors' looting expeditions and after an unprecedented broad and rapid transfer of wealth upward by Wall Street and its corporate satellites, where is the popular anger directed, at least as depicted in the media? At "Washington spending" - which has increased primarily to provide unemployment compensation, food stamps and Medicaid to those economically damaged by the previous decade's corporate saturnalia. Or the popular rage is harmlessly diverted against pseudo-issues: death panels, birtherism, gay marriage, abortion, and so on, none of which stands to dent the corporate bottom line in the slightest.
Thus far, I have concentrated on Republican tactics, rather than Republican beliefs, but the tactics themselves are important indicators of an absolutist, authoritarian mindset that is increasingly hostile to the democratic values of reason, compromise and conciliation. Rather, this mindset seeks polarizing division (Karl Rove has been very explicit that this is his principal campaign strategy), conflict and the crushing of opposition.
As for what they really believe, the Republican Party of 2011 believes in three principal tenets I have laid out below. The rest of their platform one may safely dismiss as window dressing: 1. The GOP cares solely and exclusively about its rich contributors. The party has built a whole catechism on the protection and further enrichment of America's plutocracy. Their caterwauling about deficit and debt is so much eyewash to con the public. Whatever else President Obama has accomplished (and many of his purported accomplishments are highly suspect), his $4-trillion deficit reduction package did perform the useful service of smoking out Republican hypocrisy. The GOP refused, because it could not abide so much as a one-tenth of one percent increase on the tax rates of the Walton family or the Koch brothers, much less a repeal of the carried interest rule that permits billionaire hedge fund managers to pay income tax at a lower effective rate than cops or nurses. Republicans finally settled on a deal that had far less deficit reduction - and even less spending reduction! - than Obama's offer, because of their iron resolution to protect at all costs our society's overclass.
Republicans have attempted to camouflage their amorous solicitude for billionaires with a fog of misleading rhetoric. John Boehner is fond of saying, "we won't raise anyone's taxes," as if the take-home pay of an Olive Garden waitress were inextricably bound up with whether Warren Buffett pays his capital gains as ordinary income or at a lower rate. Another chestnut is that millionaires and billionaires are "job creators." US corporations have just had their most profitable quarters in history; Apple, for one, is sitting on $76 billion in cash, more than the GDP of most countries. So, where are the jobs? Another smokescreen is the "small business" meme, since standing up for Mom's and Pop's corner store is politically more attractive than to be seen shilling for a megacorporation. Raising taxes on the wealthy will kill small business' ability to hire; that is the GOP dirge every time Bernie Sanders or some Democrat offers an amendment to increase taxes on incomes above $1 million. But the number of small businesses that have a net annual income over a million dollars is de minimis, if not by definition impossible (as they would no longer be small businesses). And as data from the Center for Economic and Policy Research have shown, small businesses account for only 7.2 percent of total US employment, a significantly smaller share of total employment than in most Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) countries.
Likewise, Republicans have assiduously spread the myth that Americans are conspicuously overtaxed. But compared to other OECD countries, the effective rates of US taxation are among the lowest. In particular, they point to the top corporate income rate of 35 percent as being confiscatory Bolshevism. But again, the effective rate is much lower. Did GE pay 35 percent on 2010 profits of $14 billion? No, it paid zero.
When pressed, Republicans make up misleading statistics to "prove" that the America's fiscal burden is being borne by the rich and the rest of us are just freeloaders who don't appreciate that fact. "Half of Americans don't pay taxes" is a perennial meme. But what they leave out is that that statement refers to federal income taxes. There are millions of people who don't pay income taxes, but do contribute payroll taxes - among the most regressive forms of taxation. But according to GOP fiscal theology, payroll taxes don't count. Somehow, they have convinced themselves that since payroll taxes go into trust funds, they're not real taxes. Likewise, state and local sales taxes apparently don't count, although their effect on a poor person buying necessities like foodstuffs is far more regressive than on a millionaire. All of these half truths and outright lies have seeped into popular culture via the corporate-owned business press. Just listen to CNBC for a few hours and you will hear most of them in one form or another. More important politically, Republicans' myths about taxation have been internalized by millions of economically downscale "values voters," who may have been attracted to the GOP for other reasons (which I will explain later), but who now accept this misinformation as dogma.
And when misinformation isn't enough to sustain popular support for the GOP's agenda, concealment is needed. One fairly innocuous provision in the Dodd-Frank financial reform bill requires public companies to make a more transparent disclosure of CEO compensation, including bonuses. Note that it would not limit the compensation, only require full disclosure. Republicans are hell-bent on repealing this provision. Of course; it would not serve Wall Street interests if the public took an unhealthy interest in the disparity of their own incomes as against that of a bank CEO. As Spencer Bachus, the Republican chairman of the House Financial Services Committee, says, "In Washington, the view is that the banks are to be regulated and my view is that Washington and the regulators are there to serve the banks."
2. They worship at the altar of Mars. While the me-too Democrats have set a horrible example of keeping up with the Joneses with respect to waging wars, they can never match GOP stalwarts such as John McCain or Lindsey Graham in their sheer, libidinous enthusiasm for invading other countries. McCain wanted to mix it up with Russia - a nuclear-armed state - during the latter's conflict with Georgia in 2008 (remember? - "we are all Georgians now," a slogan that did not, fortunately, catch on), while Graham has been persistently agitating for attacks on Iran and intervention in Syria. And these are not fringe elements of the party; they are the leading "defense experts," who always get tapped for the Sunday talk shows. About a month before Republicans began holding a gun to the head of the credit markets to get trillions of dollars of cuts, these same Republicans passed a defense appropriations bill that increased spending by $17 billion over the prior year's defense appropriation. To borrow Chris Hedges' formulation, war is the force that gives meaning to their lives.
A cynic might conclude that this militaristic enthusiasm is no more complicated than the fact that Pentagon contractors spread a lot of bribery money around Capitol Hill. That is true, but there is more to it than that. It is not necessarily even the fact that members of Congress feel they are protecting constituents' jobs. The wildly uneven concentration of defense contracts and military bases nationally means that some areas, like Washington, DC, and San Diego, are heavily dependent on Department of Defense (DOD) spending. But there are many more areas of the country whose net balance is negative: the citizenry pays more in taxes to support the Pentagon than it receives back in local contracts.
And the economic justification for Pentagon spending is even more fallacious when one considers that the $700 billion annual DOD budget creates comparatively few jobs. The days of Rosie the Riveter are long gone; most weapons projects now require very little touch labor. Instead, a disproportionate share is siphoned off into high-cost research and development (from which the civilian economy benefits little); exorbitant management expenditures, overhead and out-and-out padding; and, of course, the money that flows back into the coffers of political campaigns. A million dollars appropriated for highway construction would create two to three times as many jobs as a million dollars appropriated for Pentagon weapons procurement, so the jobs argument is ultimately specious.
Take away the cash nexus and there still remains a psychological predisposition toward war and militarism on the part of the GOP. This undoubtedly arises from a neurotic need to demonstrate toughness and dovetails perfectly with the belligerent tough-guy pose one constantly hears on right-wing talk radio. Militarism springs from the same psychological deficit that requires an endless series of enemies, both foreign and domestic.
The results of the last decade of unbridled militarism and the Democrats' cowardly refusal to reverse it[4], have been disastrous both strategically and fiscally. It has made the United States less prosperous, less secure and less free. Unfortunately, the militarism and the promiscuous intervention it gives rise to are only likely to abate when the Treasury is exhausted, just as it happened to the Dutch Republic and the British Empire.
3. Give me that old time religion. Pandering to fundamentalism is a full-time vocation in the GOP. Beginning in the 1970s, religious cranks ceased simply to be a minor public nuisance in this country and grew into the major element of the Republican rank and file. Pat Robertson's strong showing in the 1988 Iowa Caucus signaled the gradual merger of politics and religion in the party. The results are all around us: if the American people poll more like Iranians or Nigerians than Europeans or Canadians on questions of evolution versus creationism, scriptural inerrancy, the existence of angels and demons, and so forth, that result is due to the rise of the religious right, its insertion into the public sphere by the Republican Party and the consequent normalizing of formerly reactionary or quaint beliefs. Also around us is a prevailing anti-intellectualism and hostility to science; it is this group that defines "low-information voter" - or, perhaps, "misinformation voter."
The Constitution to the contrary notwithstanding, there is now a de facto religious test for the presidency: major candidates are encouraged (or coerced) to "share their feelings" about their "faith" in a revelatory speech; or, some televangelist like Rick Warren dragoons the candidates (as he did with Obama and McCain in 2008) to debate the finer points of Christology, with Warren himself, of course, as the arbiter. Politicized religion is also the sheet anchor of the culture wars. But how did the whole toxic stew of GOP beliefs - economic royalism, militarism and culture wars cum fundamentalism - come completely to displace an erstwhile civilized Eisenhower Republicanism? It is my view that the rise of politicized religious fundamentalism (which is a subset of the decline of rational problem solving in America) may have been the key ingredient of the takeover of the Republican Party. For politicized religion provides a substrate of beliefs that rationalizes - at least in the minds of followers - all three of the GOP's main tenets.
Televangelists have long espoused the health-and-wealth/name-it-and-claim it gospel. If you are wealthy, it is a sign of God's favor. If not, too bad! But don't forget to tithe in any case. This rationale may explain why some economically downscale whites defend the prerogatives of billionaires.
The GOP's fascination with war is also connected with the fundamentalist mindset. The Old Testament abounds in tales of slaughter - God ordering the killing of the Midianite male infants and enslavement of the balance of the population, the divinely-inspired genocide of the Canaanites, the slaying of various miscreants with the jawbone of an ass - and since American religious fundamentalist seem to prefer the Old Testament to the New (particularly that portion of the New Testament known as the Sermon on the Mount), it is but a short step to approving war as a divinely inspired mission. This sort of thinking has led, inexorably, to such phenomena as Jerry Falwell once writing that God is Pro-War.
It is the apocalyptic frame of reference of fundamentalists, their belief in an imminent Armageddon, that psychologically conditions them to steer this country into conflict, not only on foreign fields (some evangelicals thought Saddam was the Antichrist and therefore a suitable target for cruise missiles), but also in the realm of domestic political controversy. It is hardly surprising that the most adamant proponent of the view that there was no debt ceiling problem was Michele Bachmann, the darling of the fundamentalist right. What does it matter, anyway, if the country defaults? - we shall presently abide in the bosom of the Lord.
Some liberal writers have opined that the different socio-economic perspectives separating the "business" wing of the GOP and the religious right make it an unstable coalition that could crack. I am not so sure. There is no fundamental disagreement on which direction the two factions want to take the country, merely how far in that direction they want to take it. The plutocrats would drag us back to the Gilded Age, the theocrats to the Salem witch trials. In any case, those consummate plutocrats, the Koch brothers, are pumping large sums of money into Michele Bachman's presidential campaign, so one ought not make too much of a potential plutocrat-theocrat split.
Thus, the modern GOP; it hardly seems conceivable that a Republican could have written the following:
"Should any political party attempt to abolish social security, unemployment insurance and eliminate labor laws and farm programs, you would not hear of that party again in our political history. There is a tiny splinter group, of course, that believes you can do these things. Among them are H. L. Hunt (you possibly know his background), a few other Texas oil millionaires and an occasional politician or business man from other areas. Their number is negligible and they are stupid." (That was President Eisenhower, writing to his brother Edgar in 1954.) It is this broad and ever-widening gulf between the traditional Republicanism of an Eisenhower and the quasi-totalitarian cult of a Michele Bachmann that impelled my departure from Capitol Hill. It is not in my pragmatic nature to make a heroic gesture of self-immolation, or to make lurid revelations of personal martyrdom in the manner of David Brock. And I will leave a more detailed dissection of failed Republican economic policies to my fellow apostate Bruce Bartlett. I left because I was appalled at the headlong rush of Republicans, like Gadarene swine, to embrace policies that are deeply damaging to this country's future; and contemptuous of the feckless, craven incompetence of Democrats in their half-hearted attempts to stop them. And, in truth, I left as an act of rational self-interest. Having gutted private-sector pensions and health benefits as a result of their embrace of outsourcing, union busting and "shareholder value," the GOP now thinks it is only fair that public-sector workers give up their pensions and benefits, too. Hence the intensification of the GOP's decades-long campaign of scorn against government workers. Under the circumstances, it is simply safer to be a current retiree rather than a prospective one.
During the week that this piece was written, the debt ceiling fiasco reached its conclusion. The economy was already weak, but the GOP's disgraceful game of chicken roiled the markets even further. Foreigners could hardly believe it: Americans' own crazy political actions were destabilizing the safe-haven status of the dollar. Accordingly, during that same week, over one trillion dollars worth of assets evaporated on financial markets. Russia and China have stepped up their advocating that the dollar be replaced as the global reserve currency - a move as consequential and disastrous for US interests as any that can be imagined. If Republicans have perfected a new form of politics that is successful electorally at the same time that it unleashes major policy disasters, it means twilight both for the democratic process and America's status as the world's leading power.
Footnotes:
[1] I am not exaggerating for effect. A law passed in 2010 by the Arizona legislature mandating arrest and incarceration of suspected illegal aliens was actually drafted by the American Legislative Exchange Council, a conservative business front group that drafts "model" legislation on behalf of its corporate sponsors. The draft legislation in question was written for the private prison lobby, which sensed a growth opportunity in imprisoning more people.
[2] I am not a supporter of Obama and object to a number of his foreign and domestic policies. But when he took office amid the greatest financial collapse in 80 years, I wanted him to succeed, so that the country I served did not fail. But already in 2009, Mitch McConnell, the Senate Republican leader, declared that his greatest legislative priority was - jobs for Americans? Rescuing the financial system? Solving the housing collapse? - no, none of those things. His top priority was to ensure that Obama should be a one-term president. Evidently Senator McConnell hates Obama more than he loves his country. Note that the mainstream media have lately been hailing McConnell as "the adult in the room," presumably because he is less visibly unstable than the Tea Party freshmen
[3] This is not a venue for immigrant bashing. It remains a fact that outsourcing jobs overseas, while insourcing sub-minimum wage immigrant labor, will exert downward pressure on US wages. The consequence will be popular anger, and failure to address that anger will result in a downward wage spiral and a breech of the social compact, not to mention a rise in nativism and other reactionary impulses. It does no good to claim that these economic consequences are an inevitable result of globalization; Germany has somehow managed to maintain a high-wage economy and a vigorous industrial base.
[4] The cowardice is not merely political. During the past ten years, I have observed that Democrats are actually growing afraid of Republicans. In a quirky and flawed, but insightful, little book, "Democracy and Populism: Fear and Hatred," John Lukacs concludes that the left fears, the right hates.
[5] The GOP cult of Ayn Rand is both revealing and mystifying. On the one hand, Rand's tough guy, every-man-for-himself posturing is a natural fit because it puts a philosophical gloss on the latent sociopathy so prevalent among the hard right. On the other, Rand exclaimed at every opportunity that she was a militant atheist who felt nothing but contempt for Christianity. Apparently, the ignorance of most fundamentalist "values voters" means that GOP candidates who enthuse over Rand at the same time they thump their Bibles never have to explain this stark contradiction. And I imagine a Democratic officeholder would have a harder time explaining why he named his offspring "Marx" than a GOP incumbent would in rationalizing naming his kid "Rand." Creative Commons License
Again, I didn't write this, but I did warn you!!
NOW THAT YOU KNOW, WHAT ARE YOU GOING TO DO? Stay Blessed & ECLECTICALLY BLACK Gloria Dulan-Wilson
I've said this again and again, and apparently the ersatz Mayor Bloomberg did not get the message: Do not piss off (or on) NEW YORKERS!
We're a pretty tolerant bunch as it goes. True, we're a mishmosh of people and cultures from all over the world, dedicated to the proposition of living the "good life" in good ole New York City. We got more accents than Carter's got Liver Pills, but we understand each other, and manage to communicate with and interact with and work with each other on a daily basis.
We have more than our share of haves and have nots amongst us; we may be somewhat envious of the "haves", but we "have nots" have managed to live side by side with them in peaceful coexistence. The line of demarcation between us and them is pretty thin. In other words, try as they might, there is no true gated society in New York City. We walk where we please, play where we please. And though we may not have had the monumentally successful financial benefits of Wall Street, we can and do go there and hang in the vicinity on a regular basis. So Zucotti Park is no sacred ground to us. It's part of New York and so are we!!
What's not a part of New York is the gestapo like police department that has been assembled by Mayor Bloomberg and Ray Kelly to oppress righteous New Yorkers who are fed up with Wall Street and that oversize Sacred Cow they have erected in the middle of Broad Street to symbolize their bullishness. It is now bullshit - and has been since Bush, Bloomberg, Madoff (who made off with billions of our dollars), and those members of the Bush Administration - the worst administration ever in the US (even the pre-depression era administration wasn't this bad), have tried to make us think that their money is more important than the lives and well being of WE, THE PEOPLE.
It was WE, THE PEOPLE, who Occupied Wall Street, not some dangerous subversives. WE, THE PEOPLE, finally got fed up with the banks and their bogus bail outs; lenders who try to hold us to a standard of FICO scores, and CREDIT RATINGS, while both their credit and credibility have been in the sewer for at least the last three+ years.
WE, THE PEOPLE are denied access to funds, denied decent housing, are set out on the streets, while the real estate industry, the brainchild of this triumvirate, continues to grind and grind and ever more escalate prices and costs right under our very noses.
As in the old movie "NETWORK", WE THE PEOPLE ARE MAD AS HELL AND AREN'T GOING TO TAKE IT ANY MORE. Short of throwing our TV sets out of the windows, under the threat of even more ignominious behavior from the so called financial powers that be, they determined that it was time to become visible, and to put some faces with the emails. Wall Street was continuing to profit from their misery, so perhaps, if they could see that there were actually real human beings at the bottom lines of those stats, maybe, just maybe, they could sit down together and revamp the way things are done, so they are more inclusive and considerate of the humans who really are the driving force of this economy.
So to the park they went. Perhaps it was originally just a march, a peaceful protest with the hopes that within a few days they would have things resolved, and everything would be back to normal. However, as we all know, that is not what happened. Instead, Mayor Bloomberg, who I have always maintained really hates New York - if he didn't he would not have lied to the citizens, would not have broken his word in reference to term limits, and would not have thrown up those ridiculous barriers in the middle of the street to stop New Yorker's flow -- gets on TV and his first response is that this is "not good for tourism."
President Obama, who has long been an advocate of government of, by, and for WE THE PEOPLE, has early on endorsed the demonstrations. If people don't stand up and make themselves visible to the meanstream press, they just keep grinding out the same old swill. It was WE THE PEOPLE who saw the value and the humanity in his approach and concern for an America that works for everybody. The fat cats, the lobbyists, and certain elected officials and their financial backers have had it too good for long, and don't want to see the Obama Principles applied in the US, especially not in their cash cow Wall Street. They have been systematically pushing New Yorkers out of their homes and jobs for decades (since 9/11). They certainly did not expect New Yorkers to push back.
Well, here we are! While we learned a thing or two from Wisconsin, we were wrestling with some home grown problems, like a mayor who openly flaunts the fact that he really does not care what New Yorkers want, unless they make more money than he does. He will fire teachers, he will change transit routes and costs; he will block programs, he will sit on funds until he gets his way. And he will callously say, through is actions: I got more money than you and I'm not afraid to use it (against you).
Now what mayor in his right mind, or heart, puts tourists before his constituents?? It took two or three days for his advisors to get him to come out with a more conciliatory tone and say they could occupy the park as long as they were peaceful. Really!
In the meantime, I knew, as did everyone else who was fluent in Bloomology, that he was fishing around for an out, for a way to undermine and thwart what the demonstrators were doing. And as OWS type demonstrations cropped up throughout the US, he became more and more determined to get them out. How dare New Yorkers defy him! How dare they challenge the worst thing to happen to New York City since Robert Moses tried to mow us down and riddle us with highways to no where? How many neighborhoods were ground into the dust under the onslaught of Moses? How many of those crass, glass Bloomberg towers are standing where real communities used to exist? - most of them, by the way, over priced and half empty,and won't last nearly as long as the original architecture they replaced. They stand as monuments to greed and disdain for the everyday working New Yorker, and a mockery to good architectural practice (by the way, what's up with the Landmark Commission, are they paying attention to any of this?)
He is the mayor who literally bragged, while the rest of us were coming up empty in our bank accounts, and were losing jobs right and left - to have started with $5 billion dollars as mayor and now have more than $20 billion (or some ridiculous figure). And we all queried then, how did that happen? How did he make so much money while we, who may even be working two or three jobs to make ends meet, are barely going home with enough to cover our overinflated, chopped up, substandard, rental apartments, or our highly mortgaged homes?
Now mind you, I love money and comfort as much as Bloomberg, and those Wall Streeters who have gotten away with big undeserved bonuses. I think it's wonderful to wake up knowing that you have a ton of money in the bank and everything is hunkey-dorey! Wow -give me that! But if I am walking on the backs of people who have lost their homes, their livelihoods, and in some cases their health, to make it happen, then what the hell am I? A Vampire, a blood sucker, Dracula's little sister!! Maybe that's why those TV series about Vampires are so popular. Maybe that's why they try to build their characters so thoroughly; so that the public will have sympathy and acceptance for the very real vampires that are in the government now. They are full of them in the Republican party, and Wall Street likewise has more than its share. If you are worshipping them, it's less likely you're going to go against them when they are trying to undermine you. You can't see the reality for the fantasy.
But digress: Had Wall Street simply resolved to return 40% of its illgotten gains back into the New York Community via community based organizations (don't give it to the Bloombergers, we may never see it), people would have taken a less dim view of their actions. Had they worked out a way for people to have truly affordable homes, in this maisma of foreclosures; we would have at least thought they had a heart.
But, predictably, Bloomberg kept searching until he found a judge he could buy, and then through a carefully scripted scenario, had him decree the OWS could stay in the park, but could have no comforts. With that the panzer movement was on, and with gestapo like precision that would make any German occupation look like amateur hour (and make Hitler very proud indeed), our New York's Finest became New York's most despicable. They moved in on unarmed, American Citizens - New Yorkers, WE THE PEOPLE! And then tried to do it under the cover of darkness. And tried to keep the media from witnessing their guilt - from showing that they had degenerated into something that no longer "serves and protects", but those who attacks and ejects, and apparently, rather liked what they were doing!
The meanstream Post (owned by Murdock, one of Bloomberg's cronies) called WE THE PEOPLE "bums" - so I do wonder why New Yorkers are even continuing to purchase a paper that looks down on US in such a hostile manner. The Daily News was more sympathetic; the New York Times was fairly objective. But the world, having witnessed this debacle from New York, one of the most liberal cities in the US, was shocked and dismayed.
As for we New Yorkers, WE THE PEOPLE, and those who have and continue to OCCUPY WALL STREET, as well as those who have set up encampments in their own cities to return the government into the hands of the people, quite frankly, we're P.O'd, and are even more determined to return our local and national governments to the people, not some bureaucratic, megalomaniac who thinks his "s-t" don't stink; not some one who thinks money is more important than people.
A friend of mine recently sent me this link to a YouTube broadcast of Keith Olbermann's Special Comment On Michael Bloomberg, that even further emphasises where I am coming from. The link in below. Check it out for yourselves. Mr. Olbermann no doubt expresses what many have been saying under their breaths for quite some time -so you may want to play it several times to get your angst out. Then, after that, it's time to get down to the real serious business of making sure that New York City never again has the kind of martinet, or megalomaniacal, or off kilter leadership (and I use the word advisedly, because what we've really had is a lack of real leaders), ever again.
CHECK OUT THE LINK. IF IT DOES NOT OPEN UP, PASTE IT IN YOUR BROWSER, OR JUST GO TO YOUTUBE
There is nothing more compelling than an Idea that has reached it's primacy. And the idea is that there is nothing, and no one, too big to fail; nothing bigger thanWE, THE PEOPLE, and WE THE PEOPLE COME FIRST, THINGS COME SECOND. With that said, we are also saying: Watch Out Bloomie, New Yorkers are really mad as hell and aren't taking it any more. New York City belongs to US, not you and your cronies. You don't have enough dollars to buy all the judges, or buy off all of we the people - oh, wait a minute, maybe you do. There are 8 million people in New York City; you've got how much now - $16 billion? Hmmmmmm???? Nah! Not enough.
Oh, well, as Olbermann says in his clip, keep on being the overbearing martinet you are, because it only fuels our resolve even more - and those clones you have in other states as well will learn the hard lesson that WE, THE PEOPLE, really do stand for each other together, and we're taking New York City back.
This is not a threat it's a PROMISE!!
To all my fellow New Yorkers STAY BLESSED & HAVE A GREAT THANKSGIVING WE'VE GOT A LOT TO DO Gloria Dulan-Wilson
[8]
