Republican or Democrat....it doesn't matter. At the end, the people who suffer the most are Middle/Working Class, tax paying, LEGAL US citizens/residents. The two party system is designed to have us squabbling with each other over petty differences while the zio loving politicians &
their corporate sponsors rob the American taxpayer & America itself, blind.
We live in an age of rigged polls and corporate journalists taking assignments from paying clients on their political reporting. And then of course we have social media, one of the biggest election “interferers” of all.
their corporate sponsors rob the American taxpayer & America itself, blind.
We live in an age of rigged polls and corporate journalists taking assignments from paying clients on their political reporting. And then of course we have social media, one of the biggest election “interferers” of all.
Election 2018 and The Unraveling of America. The Great Distraction. Rising Social Inequality
If they’re Millennials, they may be considering whether even to vote
or not, since neither wing of the corporate Party of America—aka
Republicans or Democrats—have done much for them over the past ten
years. Burdened mostly with low paying service jobs and $ trillion
dollar student debt payments that consume roughly 37% of their
paychecks, with real incomes well below what their parents were earning
at their age, and with prospects for the future even more bleak, many
Millennials no doubt wonder what’s in it for them by voting for either
party’s candidates.
Will Millennial youth even bother to turn out to vote? As an
editorial in the Financial Times business newspaper recently noted,
“Only 28% of Americans aged 18 to 29 say they are certain to vote this
November”. Political cynicism has become the dominant characteristic of
much of their generation—deepening since the politicians’ promises made
in 2008 have failed to materialize under Obama and now Trump.
If they’re Latinos and Hispanics, as they go to the polls they are
aware their choice is either Trump Republicans who consider them
enemies, criminals and drug pushers; or Democrats who, in the past under
Obama, deported their relatives in record numbers and repeatedly
abandon programs like DACA (‘Dreamers’) as a tactical political
necessity, as they say. Who will they trust least? One shouldn’t be
surprised if they too largely sit it out, harboring a deep sense of
betrayal by Democrats and concern they may soon become the next ‘enemy
within’ target of Trump and his White Nationalist shock troops who are
being organized and mobilized behind the scenes by Trump’s radical right
wing buddy, Steve Bannon, and his billionaire and media friends.
If they’re African Americans, they know from decades of experience
that nothing changes with police harassment and murders, regardless
which party is in power.
If they’re union workers in the Midwest, they know the Democrats are
the party of free trade and job offshoring, while Republicans are the
party favoring low minimum wages, elimination of overtime pay,
privatization of pensions, and cuts to social security.
All these key swing groups of Millennials, Hispanics,
African-Americans, and union workers in the midwest—i.e. those who gave
Obama an overwhelming victory in 2008, gave him one more chance in
office in 2012 despite failure to deliver, and then gave up on the
unfulfilled promises in 2016—will likely not be thinking about the real
‘issues’ as they go to the polls. For the ‘Great Distraction’ is
underway like never before.
The Great Distraction
It’s the ‘enemy within’ that’s the problem, we’re told by Trump. And
the ‘enemy without’. Or, in the case of the immigrant—it’s both: the
enemy without that’s coming in! So put up the barbed wire. Grab their
kids when they arrive, as hostage bait. Send the troops to the border
right now, to stop the hordes that just crossed into southern Mexico
yesterday. Hurry, they’re almost here, rapidly proceeding to the US on
foot. (They run fast, you see). They’re in Oaxaca southern Mexico.
They’ll be here tomorrow, led by Muslim terrorists, carrying the bubonic
plague, and bringing their knapsacks full of cocaine and heroin.
And if the enemy immigrant is not enough is not enemy enough, the
‘enemy within’ is increasingly also us, as Trump adds to his enemies
list the ‘mob’ of Americans exercising their 1st amendment rights to
assembly and protest against him. And don’t forget all those dangerous
Californians who won’t go along with his climate, border incarceration,
trade or other policies. Or their 80 year old Senator Diane Feinstein,
their ring-leader in insurrection. They’re all the ‘enemy within’ too.
The chant ‘lock ‘em up’ no longer means just Hillary. So Trump
encourages and turns loose his White Nationalist supporters to confront
the horde, the mob, and their liberal financiers like George Soros. If all this is not an unraveling, what is?
Not to be outdone in the competition for the Great Distraction,
there’s the Democrats resurrecting their age-old standby ‘enemy
without’: the Russians. They’re into our voting machines. Watch out.
They’re advancing on Eastern Europe, all the way to the Russian-Latvian
border. Quick, send NATO to the Baltics! Arrange a coup partnering with
fascists in Ukraine! Install nuclear missiles in Poland! And start
deploying barbed wire on the coast of Maine and Massachusetts, just in
case.
However, behind all the manufactured fear of immigrants, US
demonstrators, and concern about violence- oriented white nationalists
whipped up and encouraged by Trump and his political followers—lies a
deeper anxiety permeating the American social consciousness today. Much
deeper. Whether on the right or left, the unwritten, the unsaid, is a
sense that American society is somehow unraveling. And it’s a sense and
feeling shared by the left, right, and center alike.
Both sides—Trump, Republicans, Democrats, as well as their respective
media machines—sidestep and ignore the deep malaise shared by Americans
today. Older Americans shake their heads and mumble ‘this isn’t the
country I grew up in’ while the younger ask themselves ‘is this the
country I’ll have to raise my kids in’?
There’s a sense that something has gone terribly wrong, and has all
the appearance will continue to do so. It’s a crisis, if by that
definition means ‘a turning point’. And a crisis of multiple dimensions.
A crisis that has been brewing and growing now for at least a quarter
century since 1994 and Newt Gingrich’s launching of the new right wing
offensive that set out purposely to make US political institutions
gridlocked and unworkable until his movement could take over—and
succeeded. It’s a crisis that everyone feels in their bones, if not in
their heads. The dimensions of the unraveling of America today are many.
Here’s just some of the more important:
Growing Sense of Personal Physical Danger
Mass and multiple killings and murders are rampant in America today,
and rising. So much so that the media and press consciously avoid
reporting much of it unless it involves at minimum dozens or scores of
dead. There are more than 33,000 gun killings a year in the US now. 90
people a day are killed by guns. While we hear of the occasional school
shooting, the fact is there are 273 school shootings so far just in
2018. That’s one per school day.
The suicide rate in America is also at record levels, with more than
45,000 a year now and escalating. Teen age suicides have risen by 70% in
just the last decade. The fastest rate of increase is among 35-64 year
olds. People are literally being driven crazy by the culture, the
insecurities, the isolation, the lack of meaningful work, the absence of
community, and the hopelessness about a bleak future that they’re
killing themselves in record numbers.
And let’s not forget the current opioid crisis. The opioid death rate
now exceeds more than 50,000 a year. These aren’t folks over-dosing in
back alleys and crack houses. These are our relatives, neighbors and
friends. And the ‘pushers’ are the big pharmaceutical companies and
their salespersons who pushed the Fetanyl and Oxycontin on doctors
telling them it was safe—just like the Tobacco companies maintained for
decades that cigarettes were ‘safe’ when their tests for decades showed
their product produced cancer. Big Pharma knew too. They are the
criminals, and their politicians are the paid-for crooked cops looking
the other way. All that’s not surprising, however, since Big Pharma is
also the biggest lobbyist and campaign contributor industry in the US.
So it’s 33,000 gun killings, 43,000 suicides, and 50,000 opioid
deaths a year. Every year. That compares to US deaths during the entire 8
years of Vietnam War of 56,000! That’s a death rate over three years
roughly equal to all Americans who died during the three and a half
years of World War II! We all got rightly upset over 2500 killed on 9-11
by terrorists. But the NRA and the Pharmaceutical companies are the
real terrorists here, and politicians are giving them a complete pass.
Instead of Big Pharma CEOs and leaders of the National Rifle
Association (NRA), we’re told the real enemies are the desperate men,
women and children willing to walk more than a thousand miles just to
get a job or to escape gang violence. Or we’re told it’s the Russians
meddling in the 2016 election and threatening our democracy—when the
real threat to American democracy is home grown: In recent
court-sanctioned gerrymandering; in mass voter suppression underway in
Georgia, North Dakota, and elsewhere; in the billions of dollars being
spent by billionaires, corporations, and their political action
committees this election cycle to ensure their pro-business, pro-wealthy
candidates win.
News of these real killing machines goes on every day, creating a
sense of personal insecurity that Americans have not felt or sensed
perhaps since the frontier settlement period in the 19th century. It’s
not the immigrants or the Russians who are responsible for the guns,
suicides, and drug overdoses. But they certainly provide a useful
distraction from those who are. People feel the danger has penetrated
their communities, their neighborhoods, their homes. But politicians
have simply and cleverly substituted the real enemies with the
immigrant, the mob, and that old standby, the Russians.
Income & Wealth Inequality Accelerating
Another dimension of the sense of unraveling is the economic
insecurity that hangs like a ‘death smog’ over public consciousness
since the 2008-09 crash. As more and more average American households
take on more debt, work more part time jobs or hours, and adjust to a
declining standard of living, they are simultaneously aware that the
wealthiest 1% or 10% are enjoying income and wealth gains not seen since
the ‘gilded age’ of the late 19th century. The share of national
pre-tax income garnered by the top 10% has risen from 35% in 1980 to
roughly 50% today. That’s 15% more to the top, equivalent to roughly
than $3 trillion more in income gains by the top 10% that used to be
distributed among the bottom 90%.
How could an America that once shared income gains from economic
growth among its classes and across geography from World War II through
the 1970s have now allowed this to happen, many ask? And why is it being
allowed to get worse?
There are many ways to measure and show this economic unraveling.
Whether national income shares for workers and wages falling from 64% to
56% of total national income; or the distribution to the rich of more
than a $1 trillion a year every year since 2009 in stock buybacks and
dividend payments; or the $15 trillion in tax cuts for investors,
businesses, and corporations since 2001; or Trump’s recent $4 trillion
tax windfall for the same; or stock market values tripling and
quadrupling since 2009; or stagnant real wage gains for the middle class
and declining real wages for those below the median.
Whatever dimension or study or statistic, the story is the same.
Economic gaps are widening everywhere. And everyone knows it. And except
for that noble, modern Don Quixote of American Politics, Bernie Sanders,
it appears no one in either party is proposing to reverse it. So the
awareness festers below the surface, adding to the realization that
something is no longer right in America.
The sense of economic unraveling may have slowed somewhat after 2010,
but it continues none the less, as millions of Americans are forced to
assume low paying service jobs. Working two or more jobs to make ends
meet. Taking Uber and gig work on the side. Going on Medicaid or
foregoing health insurance coverage altogether. Moving to lower quality
housing and taking on more room-mates. Treading economic water in good
times, and sinking and gasping for air during recessions and in the bad
times. Just making due. While the wealthy grow unimaginably wealthier by
the day.
Never-Ending Wars
The sense of anxiety is exacerbated by the never ending wars of the
21st century. How is it they never end, given the most powerful military
and funding of more than $1 trillion a year every year, it is asked?
Newspaper headlines haven’t changed much for 17 years. The war in
Afghanistan and elsewhere continues. Change the dates and you can insert
the same news copy. With more than 1000 US bases in more than 100
countries, America since 2001 has been, and remains, on a perpetual war
footing. All that’s changed since 2000 is that the USA no longer pays
for its wars by raising taxes, as it had throughout its history. Today
the US Treasury and Federal Reserve simply ‘borrow’ the money from
partners in empire elsewhere in the world—while they cut taxes on the
rich at the same time.
And the annual war bill is going up, fast. Trump has increased annual
spending on ‘defense’ by another $85 billion a year for the past two
years. Approaching $150 billion if the notorious US ‘black budget’
spending on new military technology development—not indicated anywhere
in print—is added to the amount. And more is still coming in the next
few years, to pay for new cybersecurity war preparation, for next
generation nuclear weapons, and for Trump’s ‘space force’. Total costs
for defense and war—not just the Pentagon—is now well over $1 trillion
annually in the US. And with tax cutting for those who might pay for it
now accelerating, the only sources to pay for the trillion dollar plus
annual US budget deficits coming for the next decade is either to borrow
more or cut Social Security, Medicare, education and other social
programs. And those cuts are coming too—soon if one believes the public
declarations of Senate Republican Majority leader, Mitch McConnell.
Technology Angst
As our streets and neighborhoods become more dangerous, as inequality
deepens, as wars, tax cuts for the rich and social program cuts for the
rest become the disturbing chronic norm— awareness is growing that
technology itself is beginning to tear apart the social fabric as well.
Admitted even by visionaries and advocates of technology, the negatives
of technology may now be outweighing its benefits.
Studies now show problems of brain development in children over-using
hand-held screen devices. Excessive screen viewing, studies show,
activates the same areas of the brain associated with other forms of
addiction. Social media is encouraging abusive behavior by enabling
offenders to hide. What someone would not dare to say or do face to
face, they now freely do protected by space and time. Social media is
transforming human communications and relations rapidly, and not always
positively. It is also enabling the acceleration of the surveillance
state. Massive databases of personal information are now accessible to
any business, to virtually any governments, and to unscrupulous
individuals around the globe intent on blackmail, threats, and worse.
Privacy is increasingly a fiction for those participating in it.
And employment is about to become more precarious because of it.
Technology is creating and diffusing new business models, destroying the
old, and doing so far too rapidly to enable adjustment for tens of
millions of people. Amazon. Uber. Gig economy. Wiping out millions of
jobs, increasing hours worked, uncertainty of employment, lowering of
wages. And next Artificial Intelligence. Projected by McKinsey and other
business consultants to eliminate 30% of current jobs by the end of the
next decade. Where will my job be in ten years, many now ask
themselves? Will I be able to make it to retirement? Will there be
anything like retirement any more after 2035?
Unchecked and unregulated accelerating technological change is adding
to the sense of social unraveling of key institutions that once
provided a sense of personal security, of social stability, of a vision
of a future that seemed more related to the present, rather than to an
even more anxiety ridden, uncertain, unstable future.
A Culture Increasingly Coarse & Decadent
When the President of the US brags he could shoot someone on the
street corner and (his) people would still love him, such statements
raise the ghostly spectre of prior decades when the vast majority of
German people thought the same of Hitler. And when one of his closest
advisers, Rudy Guliani, declares publicly that ‘Truth is not the Truth’,
it amounts to an endorsement for an era of lies and gross
misrepresentation by public figures. With chronic lying the political
norm, what can anyone believe from their elected officials, many now
ask? It’s no longer engaging in political spin for one’s particular
policy or program. It’s politics itself spinning out of control. Public
political discourse consists increasingly to targeting, insulting,
vilifying, and threatening one’s political opponents. Trump’s railing
against politicians and government itself smacks of Adolph’s constant
insulting indictment of democratically elected Weimar German governments
and leaders in the 1920s. It leaves the American public with a nervous
sense of how much further can and will this targeting, personalizing,
and threatening go?
But the political culture is not the only cultural element in
decline. A broader cultural decline has become evident as well.
Americans flock to view films of dystopia visions of America, of
zombies, and ever-intense CGI violence where fictitious super heroes
save the world. More of popular music has become overtly misogynous,
angry, mean, and violent in both sound and lyrics. And has anyone
recently watched how high schoolers now dance, in effect having sex with
their pants on?
Collapse of Democratic Institutions
Not least is the sense of unraveling of political institutions and
the practice of democracy itself. As a recent study estimated, Democracy
is in decline in the US, having dropped in an aggregate score of 94 in
2010 to a low of 86 today—when measured in terms of free and fair
elections, citizen participation in politics, protection of civil rights
and liberties, and the rule of law. The study by the non-profit,
Freedom House, concluded “Democracy is in crisis’ and under assault and
in retreat.
In America, the restrictions on civil rights and liberties have been
growing and deepening since 2001 and the Patriot Acts, institutionalized
in annual NDAA legislation by Congress thereafter. Legislatures have
been gerrymandered to protect the incumbents of both wings of the
Corporate party of America. The US Supreme Court has expanded its
authority to select presidents (Gore v. Bush in 2001), defined
corporations as people with the right to spend unlimited money which it
defines as free speech (Citizens United), and will likely next decide
that Presidents (Trump) can pardon himself if indicted (thus ending the
fiction that no one is above the law and endorsing Tyranny itself).
The two wings of the Corporate Party of America meanwhile engage in
what is an internecine class war between factions of the American ruling
class. More billionaires openly contest for office as it becomes clear
millions and billions of dollars are now necessary to get elected.
Voter suppression spreads from state to state to disenfranchise
millions, from Georgia to the Dakotas, to Texas and beyond. If one lacks
a street number address, or an ID card, or has ever committed a felony,
or hasn’t voted recently, or doesn’t sign a ballot according to their
birth certificate name, or any other number of technical errors—they are
denied their rights as citizens. What was formerly ‘Jim Crow’ for
blacks in the South has become a de facto ‘Jim Crow Writ Large’
encompassing even more groups across a growing number of states in
America.
A sense of growing political disenfranchisement adds to the feeling
that the country is politically unraveling as well—-adding to the
concurrent fears about growing physical insecurity, worsening economic
inequality and declining economic opportunities, and an America mired in
never ending wars. An America in which it is evident that political
elites are increasingly committed to policies of redistribution of
national wealth to the wealthiest. An America where more fear that
technology may be taking us too far too fast. An America where the
culture grows meaner, nastier and more decadent, where lies are central
to the political discourse, and where political institutions no longer
serve the general welfare but rather a narrow social and economic elite
who have bought and captured those institutions.
And, not least, an America where politicians seem intent on drifting
toward a nationalism on behalf of a soon to be minority White
America—i.e. politicians who are willing to endorse violence and
oppression of the rest in order to opportunistically assume and exercise
power by playing upon the fears, anxieties, and insecurities as the
unraveling occurs.
*
Dr. Rasmus is author
of the forthcoming book, ‘The Scourge of Neoliberalism: US Policy from
Reagan to Trump’, forthcoming 2019 by Clarity Press. He hosts the weekly
radio show, Alternative Visions, on the Progressive Radio Network and
blogs at jackrasmus.com. His twitter handle is @drjackrasmus. He is a frequent contributor to Global Research.
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