Jon Faulkner posted this analysis on Tuesday. It deserves a wider reading and commentary. Faulkner describes how for thirty years half the population (mostly in the South and Midwest) enthusiastically endorsed the GOP vilifying their government, stripping it of its tax base, bankrupting it, selling Congress to special interests, and throwing out the Jeffersonian social justice that had defined the people's democracy for 200 years.
And what have they reaped from cheer leading this GOP agenda? Their manufacturing jobs are shipped to China, New York finance capital has destroyed the Main Street economy, their income and assets have been stripped by un restrained corporate rapacity, government has been privatized, and media subverted. And then they were forced to bail out Wall Street. While people have the the franchise, they willingly threw it away and now they richly deserve their fate.
Jon Faulkner writes:
As is seen in election after election, almost half of the electorate is supportive of the Republican Party’s acclaimed goal - bringing down the U.S. Government. The rural south and mid-west are reliable supporters of the Conservative Right even though its plain that Republican goals have long centered on privatizing all government services and functions. The political process, now fully privatized, is in the final stage of destroying centralized government in favor of a plutocratic oligarchy. The U.S. Government is so deeply mired in debt it can never recover its former role as an arbiter of social and economic justice. The last of American’s collective wealth has been transferred to the financial interests that are now, in effect, the government.
Far too many Americans failed to recognize the responsibility they had for their nation’s well being. It was inevitable that a political force would step into the vacuum. Americans have supported the Republican Party in destroying the nation’s tax base. Right Wing media has used a willing public’s airwaves to spread the Right’s lies, and to conceal the Conservative Right’s guilt in destroying the tax base thereby turning the nation from the world’s largest creditor to the world’s largest debtor. Americans, especially those from the rural, red states, swallow these obvious lies enthusiastically and without question.
Congress postures and orates grandly as the American people are bled dry, and the banks remain aloof to any regulations or minimal standards of social and economic behavior. The republicans have accomplished their long held goals. They have finally succeeded in bringing down a nation that had once seen social justice as a central tenet of its value.
So Americans richly deserve their fate. Does this illuminate anything about health care reform? If the VOTERS don't begin to notice who is manipulating them, and what the inevitable result will be, they will also richly deserve the health care they (won't) get.