Actions Speak Louder than Words
June 26th, 2006 | by Dr. Forbush |Politics in America is all about the marketing. This is because the entire American culture is based on marketing. If the average person would stop for a minute after they watch an ad on TV for the latest movie and say to themselves, “It will be out on DVD in three months, I can wait,” then American would be one step closer to being a thinking society. Instead, what we have in America the reacting society. Americans are influenced to buy sugar water with flavoring in the hopes of meeting the opposite sex, simply because they have been told that this will happen. In a society where the majority of Americans sit in front of the TV watching ads every 10 minutes, how could we expect anything different?
The truth is out there, but few Americans have the motivation to look for it.
Politicians from both political parties have been using the media to convey their messages for quite some time now. In the past it was always assumed the politicians would bend the truth a bit by not mentioning certain sticky issues. But, it was generally assumed that any politician that lied would certainly been exposed as a liar and become unelectable. This was one method that our Democracy could be protected from propaganda and deception.
The founding fathers worried that the masses could be incited to riot and virtually any law and order could be destroyed if the majority willed it. This was why only white, male, property owners were given the right to vote, because they had a stake in maintaining the status quo.
Since that time the rational for having a stake in maintaining the status quo had come into question quite a few times. The status quo was believed to be flawed and other members of the society had a right to express their views and make society fairer for everyone. It was believed that education would be the key to maintaining law and order and preventing a total upheaval of the current system. Therefore, by educating our children it was intended that our children would learn to love the democratic republic that they inherited and make sure they maintain it.
Unfortunately, I believe our education system has not taught the value of our current system over the last forty years and we have a population who no longer understands the system of government we have, or the purpose of many pieces of the system. This lack of education could simply be exploited by those who care to change the system for their own good. And, I believe that this has been happening over the past twenty some years as the conservatives have spread lies and deception to those young adults who never learned to understand and appreciate how government functions.
Of course we all know how Ronald Reagan came to power to shrink government, and he cut taxes and raised spending which mainly helped the wealthy class by letting the wealthy keep their money and taxing the middle class in the long turn to pay back the debt. The spending was believed to help the economy, but those who made money were mainly the wealthy while Ronald Reagan fought to lower wages by keeping unemployment high and then adding more jobs to the service economy. The intention was to create a bit of worry among the middle class, so they would work for lower pay in order to keep their jobs instead of loosing their jobs and be forced to work for minimum wage at McDonalds or other low pay service industry job. Over time we have seen the results of this policy to make the wealthy richer while the poor and middle class get poorer. In order to catch the wealth bandwagon one needs to invest in stocks and bonds and own property.
The 401K and IRA plans of the Reagan administration actually played in to this strategy as well. These plans encourage the average employee to contribute to a retirement plan that would be protected from taxes until it is withdrawn. In this way many people who never owned stock before have been able to own stock. This is good, but if you have a large number of people purchasing stock on a regular basis it is quite clear that these regular purchases create demand where it hadn’t existed before and force the stock prices higher. But, just because stock prices go higher does not mean that stock value goes up at the same rate. Those who own stock early in the scheme will be able to sell their low value stock at a higher price than they would otherwise be able to. This type of activity certainly may have lead to the stock market bubbles we have seen.
But, conservatives argue that this is great for the average American, while study after study still shows that average Americans are actually getting poorer while wealthy Americans are getting richer.
In fact, if you look at the conservative policies as a whole over the last twenty years they seem to be creating a wealthy group of Americans at the top of the economic scale, while they are creating a group of cheap labor at the bottom of the economic pool. If we add to this the corruption of the conservatives in both industry and government by looking at the examples of ENRON, Global Crossing, Jack Abramoff, Tom Delay and the others we begin to see a picture of America moving closer to the Mexico. It would certainly be ironic if America were to continue down this path while Mexico and other Latin American countries begin to shed their legacy of the elite wealthy class and government corruption.
Unless the American people begin to draw themselves away from the media that markets to them and they begin to think for themselves America won’t be much different than Mexico in a few short years. Maybe this is how the conservatives plan to solve the immigration issue, with Americans migrating to Mexico looking for freedom and employment.
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Don’t forget what Stephen Colbert said, “Reality has a well-known liberal bias.”
Cross Posted @ Bring It On, tblog, Blogger and BlogSpirit
