brandenpridgen

Posts by: brandenpridgen

It Isn’t Envy, Mitt

Apr 28

Mitt Romney says that the anger of the 99%-ers is based upon envy of the 1%-ers, but like so many other things he believes about “the rest of us,” he has it wrong. We don’t hate rich people because they are rich and there is a critical differentiation that Romney and so many others simply refuse to see.

We want our kids to have it better than we did, so we believe in the American Dream and we applaud those who have lived it and prospered and earned their wealth and success. These people are models for our kids who will inspire them to break through barriers to create the cures for diseases and the products that will make our all our lives better. No, we don’t resent those who have followed that path and succeeded. We admire them.

The people who are resented by the American 99% are those who have become wealthy and continue to get even wealthier by keeping others down. And we resent the politicians who suck up and sell out to these people for their own interests at the expense of everyone else.

Be clear that these are people who have rigged the game, tilted the table against the poor, the middle class and even the upper-middle class. They have spent every waking moment since the inauguration of Ronald Reagan incrementally inching America toward a new economic and military feudal state and have done so by impoverishing all but the top 1%. They are creating an America of subsistence and poverty that is devoid of the American Dream for everyone but themselves.

Paul Ryan’s twice-proposed budget is designed specifically to throw more money to the 1% at the expense of our most needy people and tilt the game still further. The Catholic Bishops weighed in against Ryan’s budget, saying that it hurts the very people – our most vulnerable – that the church seeks to protect. They are right and he is not, regardless of the sweet face he puts on his proposal and the dismissive things he says about his detractors.

The way to reverse the upside-down world that Ryan and the 1% want to create and to stop the theft of the American Dream is to vote for candidates who will make that happen. It is about electing people who will put a stop to the glut of influence money in politics that makes guys like Ryan propose such regressive budgets. It is quite likely that your Democratic candidate answers that description.

So, the way to make a difference is to help the D candidate win, not because s/he’s a Democrat – that would be a dumb reason – but because s/he will vote in congress the way that makes sense to you. So, volunteer in their campaign. Hold an informational meeting for friends and neighbors at your house for your candidate. Their election staff will tell you how to do that. Volunteer at a phone bank. Put out a lawn sign and slap a bumper sticker on your car.

The issue is to be active, because passivity will breed more of the same as we are seeing now and our children and grandchildren will inherit an America that you couldn’t possibly recognize. I do not mean that as hyperbole; my own grandfather would not recognize America today, even as he was an ardent anti-New Deal guy and thought both the income tax and Franklin Roosevelt were the worst things on the planet.

Actually, I take that back; he would recognize this, because the unregulated greed that hurts Americans and led to the meltdown in 2008 and the continuing decline of the middle class is exactly what he saw as a young father in the 1920’s. He’d recognize the influence peddling in Washington, the dumb bubble economy, the spinelessness in congress and more. He would be waving a red flag and yelling, “DANGER” because he would have seen what happens when we do dumb stuff like we’ve done and he would be asking whether there is anybody who remembers history, because Santayana was right – in our refusal to remember history we were doomed to repeat it and we have done just that. The difference is that after Hoover, we learned our lesson and started to make things better.

Today the righties want to do things that will make things worse. The real question is why they would want that. The 1%-ers want that because it makes them richer and keeps them in control. The politicians want that because that way the rich people continue to throw money to them that perpetuates their careers and their wealth building and keeps them in control, too. As for why any Tea Partier would want that – more on that another time.

For now, just be clear that things will get worse unless we make them get better. It is up to those with a ballot in November to stop the theft of America. If we fail to show up, if we fail to man the barricades against this assault on the America we believe in, then the American Dream, that future we want for our children and grandchildren will be lost for generations. Tag, you’re IT.

Chilling

Apr 09

“I don’t want everybody to vote. Elections are not won by a majority of the people. They never have been from the Paul Weyrich beginning of our country and they are not now. As a matter of fact, our [far right conservative] leverage in the elections quite candidly goes up as the voting populace goes down.”

That was said by Paul Weyrich (pictured appropriately on the far right). He died in 2008 but his absolutist attitude and his vision of a right-wing Christian America run by the wealthy and forced upon everyone else lives on. You can find it prominently applied through the efforts of at least 22 Republican state legislatures working diligently right now to prevent poor people, the elderly and minorities from voting.

You might be fooled by the names of some patriotic sounding organizations, like The Heritage Foundation and the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) and the Free Congress Foundation, all of which Weyrich co-founded. You’ll only find them patriotic, though, if you are a rich person who likes to dominate and control other people and for whom greed is a key personal value.

The people at these organizations are fighting to create an America that is like the Gilded Age, a time in America when the wealthy had all the advantages and everyone else suffered. Over the past 30 years the far righties have done a very good job of incrementally moving America in that direction. They have managed to bring us laws that have made sure that our largest, most profitable industries continue to get billions of dollars in tax breaks, even as our small businesses and middle class families deal with recession and economic despair but still pay their taxes. They have helped to engineer the removal of protections of the air you breathe, the water you drink and the food you eat and they have abandoned the anti-trust regulations that would otherwise protect us from the pirates who are too big to fail.

Worst of all, they have been a driving force in making sure that much of our congress is bought and paid for by big money interests, all to the detriment of 99% of Americans. Their purchase guarantees no reforms of their freedom robbing ways and a one-way ticket to subsistence living for you. They have institutionalized that big money influence through legislation and through the democracy destroying Citizens United case decided by five radical Supreme Court justices.

The Paul Weyrich protégés at ALEC are hard at work engineering an authoritarian feudal system for the benefit of only the richest, run by people who allow no room for your differing opinion and who do not care about your suffering. And they might get their way because the, “. . . [far right conservative] leverage in the elections quite candidly goes up as the voting populace goes down.” If that happens they will win and you will lose and you will not like what happens. It will be chilling, like a horror movie made real.

Yet, at least for now the future is still in our hands and we can make this an America for all of us. It’s that “ . . . freedom and justice for all” part of the Pledge of Allegiance and there really is only one way to stop the Weyrich big money madness and set America back on track.

On November 6, 2012 you get to decide the future we’ll create for you, your children and your grandchildren. All you have to do is show up and vote. Put it on your calendar right now.

The Common Wisdom

Mar 10

We all know that the country is center-right. Perhaps it’s there as a result of a pendulum swing from the socially farther left pendulum of the 60’s and the politicians and pundits now like to tell us we’re center-right almost as throw-away line. Or maybe people just keep saying that and have done so for such a long time that we’ve come to believe it, but repetition doesn’t make the claim accurate. Take a look at just a few issues before us.

Jobs – About 306 million of we 307 million Americans want the government to take energetic action to ramp up the economy and create jobs. The noise from the far right is the only thing that is making it seem like there is huge opposition to that. As a nation, we are left of center now on jobs.

Voting rights – Americans believe overwhelmingly that all of us over the age of 18, with the possible exception of convicted felons, should vote. That’s pretty much smack dab in the center, not center-right. On the other hand, there are Republican strategists who have openly stated that the only people they want to vote are those who will vote Republican.

In the 2010 election many states voted far right legislators into office and they have enacted laws they have fraudulently proclaimed are to protect us from a blight of voting fraud. The thing is that voting fraud almost never happens – not even in Chicago. These laws serve solely as an obstacle to voting for young people, the elderly, the poor and those in minorities who tend to vote overwhelmingly Democratic. Let’s see, righty R’s preventing D’s from voting. Hmmm.

Immigration – Most of us believe that if people do something wrong that they should bear the consequences. And most of us believe that children of illegal immigrants, born in this country and who have broken no laws should not bear those consequences. Righties don’t want to pass the Dream Act and they are completely out of step with the majority of Americans. The R’s continue to oppose it because they’re afraid they’ll get “primaried” in the next election by a fanatic on the lunatic right fringe. That keeps them disconnected from everyone but the aforementioned lunatic right fringe.

This issue is complex, but as a nation we’re pretty much in the center.

Taxes on the wealthy – Depending on the week and the poll, anywhere between 62 – 80% of Americans favor increased taxes on the rich. Only the righties who signed Grover Norquist’s pledge to never raise taxes, along with some already wealthy people are opposed to that. That is to say, the country is center-left on this issue.

Contraception – Do you really need an explanation about this? Even 98% of Catholic women have used some form of birth control and only some fundamentalist righties have a problem with it. It’s just that a few of them have very loud voices. We Americans are far left in favor of contraception.

Women’s choice – The majority of Americans continue to be pro-choice, although by a smaller margin now than in past decades. In part that’s because of the loss of institutional memory of how things used to be before Roe v. Wade. It wasn’t pretty. We are center-left on this.

Global warming – It’s not just all the environmental scientists; most Americans believe that the Earth is getting warmer and that mankind’s activities like burning fossil fuels is contributing to it. The only question is why anyone denies that. To find the answer, follow the money. It’s way on the right. (Ref: “And another thing” below)

Social Security & Medicare – These are the two most popular programs ever created by the federal government and America is far left on them. Only the righties want to abolish or privatize them.

Note to budget hawk absolutist righties: We made a contract with the American people, who pre-paid for these services and we must keep our word. I know you’ll understand that.

Education – The righties want to abolish the Department of Education at both the federal and state levels. They are starving schools of funds, so teachers, administrators and janitors are being laid off. School maintenance and improvement projects are being halted and the disparity between the education of our poor children and the rich kids who get to go to elite schools continues to widen. Our children are suffering, their future becomes bleaker every day we fail them and we are putting the future of America in peril.

Americans don’t like this. They want their children to be educated and think public education is a very good thing. The righties are completely out of sync with America on this. This country is way left on education.

Healthcare – Most Americans want the government to do more to fix it. All that is standing in the way is the resistance borne of the hundreds of billions of dollars being collected every year by the medical insurance companies, big pharma, big hospitals and a few others. We’ve tried letting the market fix this. That has resulted in our having the most expensive healthcare in the world, while at the same time we’re getting just middling results. Only the far righties with megaphones attached to their faces think that continuing to let the free market work is the solution. We want affordable healthcare and are at least center-left on this issue.

The list can go on until sunrise. Those saying that we are a center-right nation have either bought into the Big Lie or think they will benefit by making you believe it.

It turns out that the common wisdom isn’t so common, nor is it so very wise after all.

—————————————————————————–

And another thing . . .

Have you seen the TV commercials with the pleasant looking blonde lady in a black pants suit talking about American energy? She tells us how plentiful it is and all we have to do is go get it. As an example, she walks across a map of the lower 48 and tells us about, ” . . . tapping Canadian oil sands for U.S. consumers.” Sounds great.

Except the plan for the Canadian oil sands crude is to transport that heaviest, dirtiest crude oil with the greatest global warming footprint via the XL Pipeline to our gulf coast for exporting to other nations. I need for them to explain once again how that stuff is for U.S. consumers because I’m not seeing how exporting it makes it for us.

One last comment: That ad and the others like it are sponsored by the American Petroleum Industry, the promotional organization of Big Oil. Just so you know.

“We move through life like a man in a rowboat, looking back even as we move forward.” – William Landay

O’ See Can You Say?

Jan 21

Scratch any neo-con and you’ll instantly hear the vision: “We want small government, low taxes and the government out of our lives.” Clear, crisp and compelling.

Scratch a progressive and you’ll hear paragraphs of theory and a rant that will make your eyes cross and will hurt your brain. And the message will change with each progressive you listen to, leaving you confused and reaching for something solid on which to steady yourself.

The righties have been selling their message consistently at least since Richard Nixon. He wanted to discredit the press – he called them the “eastern liberal press.” They were the people he saw through his paranoia as always attacking him. So, he had his felon vice-president Spiro T. Agnew call them “nattering nabobs of negativity” and Agnew used that moniker over and over. It didn’t matter whether people knew what a nabob was, because the message that the press can’t be trusted got through. And it is continuing to get through.

The attack on the press (now the “media”) has most recently and shrilly been blared through the snarling lips of Sarah Palin, who calls the press the “lamestream media,” which is odd, since she is a regular on Fox News, making her part of the “lamestream media.”

The press used to be called the Fourth Estate. It was seen as a de facto check on government and was trusted to do that job. Not so much any more, though, after 44 years of being slimed by the self-appointed Republican attack machine.

Ronald Reagan was up front in selling distrust of government. He told us that the nine most feared words in the English language are, “I’m from the government and I’m here to help.” He played into people’s stereotyped attitudes and frustrations and got himself elected as the head of the government, strangely doing this by denouncing government.

He told us he was for small government, low taxes and the government out of our lives. Then he set about massively increasing government, raising taxes twelve times and building national debt that surpassed all other presidents combined. Yet strangely, he’s still remembered as the president who was for small government and low taxes. That disconnect can be traced to neo-cons selling the Reagan image (not the substance) consistently for twenty-four years, so that few Americans hear the lie and realize that the Republicans are largely responsible for the terrible economic situation in which Americans find themselves and their country today.

At the most recent Republican primary debate one of the candidates used the post office as an example of government failure and illustrative of how we don’t want government running our healthcare. The South Carolina Republican audience loved it, even though the post office is a model of low cost mail delivery that consistently produces excellent results. It was fiscally solvent until the Republicans required it to fully fund the pensions of workers not yet born. Furthermore, the government runs Medicare and nobody on Medicare – not a single person – will say they don’t like it. Still, the image of government bungling and inefficiency sells to an already jaded public.

The point is that the Republicans have had great success in keeping their hands on power by selling a clear, crisp and compelling vision in a clear, crisp and compelling way. And they have done that while pursuing exactly the opposite of what they promise. To be sure, that dichotomy is not solely the province of Republicans; however, what is most important to learn is the excellence of their messaging. It sells. It gets votes. It wins elections.

People have chuckled for decades over Will Rogers’ declaration, “I’m not a member of an organized political party. I’m a Democrat.” Somehow, that isn’t quite as funny today, when America is desperate for organization around a clear, crisp and compelling vision that is worthy of us and doesn’t pander to extremists.

We’re struggling through the largely fact-free world of politics with little but lies and distortion to be seen. It’s time the progressives got it together to produce a clear, crisp and compelling message to go along with a clear and vibrant strategy. The best products don’t always win, but the best marketing does.

Not Very Brave New World

Jan 11

During one of the Republican primary season debates Wolf Blitzer posed a question to the candidates about healthcare. He imagined a young fellow who was significantly ailing and was in the emergency room of a hospital where they determined that he would die if not treated immediately. Blitzer further said to imagine that his hypothetical subject was without financial means and did not have healthcare insurance. His question was about what the hospital staff should do.

After a couple of beats someone in the audience shouted, “Let him die.” There were cheers from others in the audience. And every one of the Republicans running to be the party nominee for the office of President of the United States went silent. Not a single one of them stood up to the hate, nor chastised the meanness of the shouted comment. Not one had the spine to display compassion for a fellow human being.

They displayed that same kind of spinelessness at another debate when a gay serviceman was shown on video with a question about gays serving openly in the military. Audience members booed him and once again these would-be leaders were silent. Be clear that this soldier is a man who puts his life on the line every day to protect those very same candidates and audience members, yet the candidates displayed neither spine nor compassion for him or for others like him.

Those yelling the loudest today are the far right radicals and they are not conservative. They are not even defenders of the Constitution. They are short sighted and closed-minded bullies masquerading as bible thumping Christians. America is suffering through an aggravated case of absolutist minds and it is killing our democracy.

In the early part of the last century one of the hateful signs hung on the doors of some companies read, “No Irish need apply.” There were signs all over the Jim Crow south that read, “Whites only.” And for decades and perhaps centuries there was and, in some places there still is, a “gentlemen’s agreement” to exclude Jews. That’s rapidly metastasizing to include Muslims. It’s more complicated than this, but at root it is a discrimination against anything that is not “us.”

We are seeing a willful brain numbing that says that anything that is not just like “us” is wrong, unpatriotic, godless and perhaps evil. How odd that is in a country that draws its strength from its diversity. We’ve always had that schizophrenic duality, but now the hateful side, the Mr. Hyde personality, is dominating the landscape in a razed earth war against everyone and everything that is not just like him. Worse, those who would be leaders are spineless against Mr. Hyde’s voice of hate and exclusion.

This is America, so the haters have the right to their hate and the candidates have the right to their cowardice. The key question is this: How long will you tolerate the hate?

Meals and Deals

Nov 05

You’re sitting at a window table of a delightful restaurant with a companion who is both interesting and interested and the conversation is engaging. Your waiter brings your food and drink at just the right times and everything is delicious and so satisfying that you don’t even notice your growing sense of contentment. Your belly is full and all is right in your world.

You glance to your right through the window and notice a man looking into the restaurant. His clothes are in poor condition, he has a plastic bag slung over his shoulder and his back is hunched as he peers through the glass. He looks hungry, but that is something that is difficult for you to understand, because you are anything but hungry. Indeed, empathy – feeling what another person feels – is very difficult when you are feeling the opposite and it’s almost impossible to imagine a homeless person’s feeling of hunger in that moment when you have just completed your meal.

So it is for the 1%-ers and their political pawns. Their lives are working quite well, they are more than content and, hard as some might try, there is not even a remote chance that they can feel what the members of a family feel as Mom and Dad lose their jobs, one because of a plant closure and the other to a layoff because business is depressed. It’s impossible for the 1%-ers and their political pawns to have even a remote understanding of the powerful feelings of the members of that family as they lose their house to foreclosure.

And when Mom and Dad join the local Occupy march, it is so easy for the 1%-ers and their political pawns to dismiss them as rabble, as lazy people and to blame them for their circumstances. According to Herman Cain, if Mom and Dad aren’t employed or rich it’s their own fault.

But here’s the thing: Mom and Dad played by the rules. They stayed in school and got an education. They got jobs and worked hard, paid their taxes, coached their kids’ soccer teams and went to their holiday pageants. They followed the American playbook, page by page, doing the right things and doing things right. And now they have lost everything and are wondering what happened to the dream they were promised.

The answer, of course, is that it was stolen from them by the big money interests who purchased their way into power and influence and who then rigged the game. They changed the playbook and didn’t tell anyone that they were gambling with the welfare of the entire world. They didn’t care about consequences because they would get their payday whether their bets paid off or lost, since all the rest of us would bail them out of their failed bets. They were confident of that bailout because they had a gun to the head of every one of us.

So much has crashed and burned and so many millions of people are suffering that it is a wonder that their cries aren’t heard. Yet what is happening instead is as predictable as the tides. Those 1%-ers and their political pawns aren’t even able to hear the cries of hunger of the millions because the rich have always just finished that metaphorical meal. Furthermore, they don’t want their world challenged or changed because it works so well for them, so they have their local muscle brutalize demonstrators, as though tear gas, nightsticks and rubber bullets might somehow make the challenge to the rich go away.

But they won’t. Swatting at symptoms never makes the root cause disappear.

The root cause is an unanswered human need for fairness. Until the game gets un-rigged and the promises kept there will be people in the streets and nearly everywhere else with the simmering anger of having played by the rules and in return gotten screwed.

There are consequences to treating people that way. 1%-ers and political pawns beware: You may not like what’s coming. Just know that you set it up to happen this way, whether you’re simply unable or, worse, callously unwilling to understand the hunger of the people.

Brilliant – And Monstrously Harmful

Apr 27

Republicans relentlessly attack Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid and spending for nearly all purposes other than defense. It seems they will do and say anything, factual or otherwise, to kill these programs. Death through legislation has not worked, though, so a while back they switched their strategy starting with Ronald Reagan.

He could not have been more clear when he declared that, “Government isn’t the solution to our problem; government is the problem.“ His message was that getting rid of as much government as possible was the goal. But instead of moving to kill social programs through legislation, he and his Republican pals deviously began to spend as much money as possible.

Reagan took WW II battleships out of mothballs and did the same with other obsolete weaponry, all at fantastic cost. His run up in debt over the eight years of his presidency was staggering. In four of his eight years he set new debt records – that means record increases to the national debt – that eclipsed all former debt figures in US history. His spending was so massive that he managed to set those debt records even while increasing taxes six times.

As he spent mind-numbing sums of your money, Reagan forged ahead to deregulate the economy. Safeguards against such disasters as financial meltdown came under attack, with Reagan and his followers declaring that free market forces will always produce the best result and that government merely needed to get out of the way. All regulation, they told us, was bad.

George H.W. Bush came next and the amazing thing about him was that he put us under even higher piles of debt in two of his four years in office. In other words, in half of the twelve years of those two Republican presidents, from 1981 – 1993, the leaders who called themselves conservatives ran up the biggest debt ever seen in the United States. Actually, it was the biggest debt ever seen in the world. Clearly, there is nothing conservative about that, but there was far worse to come.

Starting in 2001, the unbridled spending mania of George W. Bush, coupled with huge, unwarranted tax reductions primarily benefitting the rich resulted in national debt increases that dwarfed all those that had preceded them. In all of US history, from 1776 to January 20, 2001, the total of all increases to the national debt was $5.6 trillion. In just eight years in office Bush ran up over $4 trillion on the government’s credit card. He did it with off budget, unfunded wars, an unfunded prescription drug plan, massive tax reductions and more. The resulting debt is so enormous that even if all debt increases were to end right now, our great- great- great-grandchildren will still be paying for Bush’s debt. That was supposed to be okay, though, because conservative Vice-President Dick Cheney told us confidently and boldly, that, “Deficits don’t matter.”

Bush left office, handing to President Obama a country mired in two wars and an economy in freefall as a result of decades of brainless adherence to Reagan’s polarized notion about free markets and deregulation. In addition, the new president inherited a congress that was intent upon stopping anything curative that he might propose, even if those same Republican legislators had promoted exactly the same things themselves. After thirty years of preparation, it was the perfect storm to eliminate all social programs and ensure long term Republican control of America.

The Republican strategy boils down to a simple mandate: Spend the country to the brink of bankruptcy so that there can be absolutely nothing we can do but to slash every government program, with the possible exception of mindless spending on defense.

How exquisitely simple and clear: Revolution through near-suicide.

This strategy is oddly compelling to Republicans and easy to enforce. Even normally sensible legislators can be brought to heel with simple, relatively cheap funding of their campaigns, along with the threat of that funding going elsewhere if they don’t comply with the near-suicide compact. That has become a self-sustaining program, with the government increasingly favoring the wealthy. Those wealthy people contribute to legislators who perpetuate the redistribution of wealth from poor and middle class people to the rich. That is to say, the wealthy fund their congressional lapdogs who create legislation to continue the reverse Robin Hood flow of money and to end anything that promotes the welfare of ordinary Americans.

All it took was the grand vision to spend America to near-suicide and leave us with no alternative but to go back to the dark days of robber barons and people suffering without medical care and dying in abject poverty.

Brilliant. And monstrously harmful.

Lemmings and Leaders

Oct 07

It’s a common belief that those cute little lemmings follow one another over a cliff and are dashed on the rocks below to their instant demise. In point of fact, lemmings aren’t particularly smart, but they do have enough innate mental ability not to follow their pals over a cliff and commit suicide. That is a most useful point.

Mark Kirk has held his job as congressman from the 10^th District for 10 years. For eight of those years he just did what he was told to do by Republican leadership and voted for every Republican spending bill. He helped to doubled the national debt, adding more to it than all previous administrations combined, from George Washington to Bill Clinton, this because Kirk was a follower.

When the issue of war, any nation’s gravest question, came before him, Mark Kirk asked not a single question in session. He didn’t require any substantiation. He didn’t offer any skepticism or even appear to raise an eyebrow. He just voted in lock step with the rest of the Republicans for the wrong war, taking us over the metaphorical cliff. He was a suicidal follower.

Here’s another, more dire way to see this. Mark Kirk lied about his military experience, claiming he had been in combat. He wasn’t. Then he sent our troops over to Iraq to be maimed and killed in combat without so much as a moment of hesitation for their welfare. That mortal hypocrisy has killed over 4,000 of our men and women, all because he wouldn’t stand up and lead. Instead, he followed his Republican masters.

My notion is that we elect people to represent us and to be leaders for us. Kirk cannot be a leader, though, if all he does is keep his head down and follow, just doing what he is told to do.

We need our leaders to be bolder than that and, certainly, they need to be at least as smart as lemmings and not follow anyone over a cliff. It’s time to fire the follower because of his total lack of leadership. It’s time to make Alexi Giannoulias our next senator.

Fear, Lies and Politics

Aug 26

According to every poll on the topic, the level of trust we Americans have for our elected officials is abysmally low – somewhere in the neighborhood of 11% for our congress people. We’ve been fed a steady diet of lies and misleading information for so long that the truth is hard to identify and we don’t know if we can trust anyone.

The dishonesty spans the entire imagination: from the WMD’s that never were in Iraq to Senator Larry “Wide Stance” Craig in the Minneapolis airport; from adulterer Governor Mark Sanford, who never was on the Appalachian trail to Senator Chuck Grassley, who tried to play you for a fool by telling you that they’re going to pull the plug on Granny; from Senator John McCain, pressed from the far right in a primary and declaring that he never said he was a maverick, to the holier-than-thou hypocrites, like the gay bashers who turn out to be gay. The list of lies, misleading statements and outrageous claims never ends, especially in this poisonous climate of fear that has gripped the nation. Just knowing about that fear is your starting point for determining who to trust and how to vote.

Listen to what candidates are saying as they try to win your vote. If they are trying to make you afraid of something – anything – that’s your clue that they are attempting to manipulate you and it’s probably being done with dishonesty. Of course, there really are things going on in the world that are frightening, but candidates using those things or the lies they invent in order to scare you is their way of telling you that they really have nothing to offer – no new ideas and no real leadership. All they have is the sales tactic called “scare ‘em and save ‘em,” which they are using to try to gain power for themselves. For the manipulators, it’s all about themselves – it’s not about you and it’s not about America.

So listen for the appeal to fear. Then run, do not walk, away from that candidate. Your future and that of your children and grandchildren is too important to leave in the hands of manipulators and liars.

Fire, Hijacking and Teaching Moments

May 22

“We’re living in an extraordinary teaching moment,” said Thom Hartmann to a Tenth Dems crowd Friday evening, “ . . . [with] the issues of the commons writ large.” That’s “commons” as in what is common to all of us, like our humanity.

Case in point: Have you heard the names of the 11 men who were killed when BP’s Deepwater Horizon oilrig exploded? That you likely have not is significant. Next case in point: In a criminal prosecution, Pfizer Pharmaceutical was penalized $1.7 billion for drugs they marketed that killed people, and no one at Pfizer was held accountable for their criminal assault on humanity. That’s significant, too, as we publicly ignore human suffering.

There are countless examples of what is at stake – in common – and the lessons they submit to everyone are what make this a teaching moment. They offer the possibility of drawing all of us toward what Hartmann calls the Radical Middle.

One practical outcome of the Gulf oil spill crisis is that we are going to be paying a lot more for shrimp and fish, if we can get them at all. Another practical piece is that the beaches where we like to vacation may be paved with tar.

The more important and immediate common piece is that people all along the Gulf coast are scared out of their skins as they envision their way of life disappearing under BP’s oil slime. These are our family members, our friends, our neighbors and our fellow Americans. At stake, too, is the American eco-structure. Do we care? Our brains are wired to care. That’s what makes us human and makes this a teaching moment.

We’re in this – all of this – together. That’s why Rand Paul does such harm to all of us when he verbally dances around his opposition to the piece of the 1964 Civil Rights Act that prohibits private companies from discrimination based on race, gender and the rest. Taking him at his word that he abhors bigotry, his idealistic notions miss the most important part. He thinks that everyone should be able to do whatever they think is in their best interests without interference from government. That is blind to the fact that people acting solely out of selfishness sometimes act cruelly and for the most hateful of reasons and they do harm to others. Worse, it seems that Rand Paul is the best that the Republicans can offer.

Mainstream Republicans – remember them? – seem to have run out of new and good ideas for America when they embarked on their southern strategy following Lyndon Johnson’s presidency. First, they appealed to people’s basest instincts around race and class and they have continued to offer just two things.

The first is yelling really scary stuff, which often prove to be complete fabrications. In the world of sales this is called the “scare ‘em and save ‘em” tactic. They yell “fire,” tell you who’s to blame and then sell you an empty fire extinguisher.

The second is to say no. To everything. All the time. And they do it with a tone of indignation and self-righteousness. There really is a certain satisfaction that comes from braying absolutes and labeling anyone who disagrees as being both wrong and unpatriotic. Unfortunately, that’s just crass manipulation and it isn’t useful for solving our very real national challenges.

That’s it. Division based on prejudice, phony fear mongering and having “no” temper tantrums. Mainstream Republicans are bankrupt of ideas.

Which is one of the reasons the Tea Bagger far right has been able to steal the show from the Republican Party. What that says is that Republicans have been bankrupt of useful ideas for so long that their party has been hijacked by radicals.

The message – the teaching moment – for us is that sitting on our Democratic hands will produce more of exactly the same result – crazy people taking power.

It is critical that we get beyond yelling at one another and start to find common solutions. That can only happen if we keep radical, crazy people’s hands off the reins of power.

So, use this teaching moment to wake people from their apolitical slumber. Start the conversations right now. Go ahead and teach them in this moment about the truth that will affect them personally. Urge them to vote on November 2. Our decisions today will affect our shrimp prices, our civil rights and our very humanity and it’s up to us to ensure our future. Don’t let the crazies take over. Do it for our common good.

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JaxPolitix

Disambiguation from the political and social musings of Jack Altschuler