It’s the oldest political trick in the book, the one used most often by rulers of a nation badly out of economic balance. Divide and rule. Turn the victims of your system against one another. Turn their attention away from the true cause of their problems. We’re seeing an absolutely masterful version of this tried and true manipulation today not only in Wisconsin this weekend, but around the country daily in a variety of guises.
It was just a little more than two years ago that the massive greed, arrogance, and stupidity of the people who have hijacked our free market system nearly bankrupted the world and plunged us into a deep economic abyss. Popular anger at these Wall Street slickers was then intense and near universal. An overwhelming majority of Americans not only wished to see them punished financially and perhaps criminally as well, but wanted the flawed system they created and presided over reformed back to what it once was — a mechanism to channel the nation’s capital into productive purposes that generated widespread prosperity, not a mechanism used to play games that only enriched the gamers.
There was then a vast free-floating pool of populism waiting to be tapped to help bring this about. The Democrats and the left generally recognized it and backed away in horror, fearing to be Foxed as “socialists.” The Republicans and the right leaped in, redirected the anger, and we got the Tea Party movement.
While the leaders of this movement are just a few Ayn Rand, dollar-sign-over-the-land cranks and billionaires determined to keep it all from the revenuers, most Tea Party people are just middle class folks who have been been sold on the idea that the threat to their own status comes from unions who protect the standards of living of their own members, and from the poor who are leaching off the nation’s riches without adding to them.
Late last year the rich and very rich got tax breaks that would have paid for most of the cutbacks now proposed by budget cutters in Washington. The divide-and-rulers have slick over this outrage in a masterly way. No major outcries over these tax giveaways. No marchers on the streets.
When the huge $128 billion milked out of our economic system by Wall Streeter in 2009 was announced, there was still widespread public anger. An even larger milking in 2010, $135 billion worth, has hardly been noticed. Why waste anger on Wall Street gamers, after all, when the poor and fast disappearing middle class have been defined as your targets of choice, the cause of your own fears about the future?
This is today’s divide and rule America. This is political and economic reality on these shores. And anyone who still thinks there’s a chance in hell for genuine bipartisanship at this moment in our history is living in a dream — or in a Georgetown townhouse.
So then, Mr. Obama. The country is badly divided. It shouldn’t be, but it is. So choose. Which side are you on, sir? Which side are you on?
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