Move Over Joe Bageant...,

make room for David Michael Green.

http://www.counterpunch.org/green07022010.html

DMG may not cover anything new here..., but hearing is oh so sweet. Do yourself a favor and read it. Talk about hitting one out of the park..., old Yankee stadium wouldn't hold this one. This is probably the best fireworks you will see..., on this Fourth of July.

How on Earth Did This Happen?

Living the Regressive Dream

By DAVID MICHAEL GREEN

Let’s be honest: We live in stunningly, jaw-droppingly, ridiculously absurd political times.

Here’s the story in a nutshell: A far-right predatory overclass has spent the last thirty years undoing the hard-fought gains of the mid-twentieth century, which had produced a robust middle class and vastly more economic and social justice in America than the country had ever known before. These regressives used every kind of deceit imaginable to persuade unsophisticated voters to choose candidates whose real agenda was to assist their plutocratic puppetmasters in fleecing the very same people who voted for them.

Such candidates ran on issues like the death penalty, immigration, bogus wars, gay marriage and abortion. But what they really were about as legislators was exporting jobs to where workers are dirt cheap and politically neutered, crashing organized labor, shifting the tax burden onto the mass public, deregulating industry to allow unhindered profit-taking on the upside and socialized public responsibility for risk on the downside, and locking in a Supreme Court majority that would never blanch at even the most outrageous rulings enhancing corporate power in American society.

If the product of this slow and silent coup wasn’t so bloody and so ruinous to so many lives, you’d really have to hand it to these guys for their political acumen and patience. It took a while, and it required the building of a broad and robust infrastructure, spanning from mainstream media to talk radio and TV to think-tanks to Congress, the presidency and the judiciary, to the GOP and now to the Democratic Party as well, but they have pretty much completely succeeded in grabbing all the levers of power in our society. They dominate its discourse entirely, and they have been almost completely successful to date in securing all the elements of their legislative, regulatory and jurisprudential agenda, at least to this point (how far they ultimately intend to go isn’t clear – the US as Honduras, perhaps? – but it’s unlikely to be pretty). Perhaps the only major exception to that rule was their 2005 failure to privatize the vast pool of public money sitting in the Social Security coffers, which they lust over lasciviously, like teenage boys inhaling online porn by the bucketful.

And it just gets better from here. We may not celebrate another real Independence Day if things don't CHANGE..., for the better that is.

Right on DMG..., write on.