MUNCIE, Indiana BLOG – Tonight we get to watch 17 republican candidates during the GOP Presidential debates trying to win the hearts of republican voters. Or, will they be trying to win the approval of the conservative media? As we’ve already witnessed, they’ve been making outrageous remarks to engage the angriest of conservative voters causing them to climb up the polls and gain approval by the media who peddles the propaganda which has nothing to do with governing America.
Muncie Voice has taken many shots at this segment of the voting population, mainly because many border on neo-fascists – a byproduct of propaganda used by conservative media. As we’ll discuss in this article, this was predicted. The angry Tea-GOP voters are only a fraction of a much bigger class called the precariat coined by our European cousins.
From a 2014 article in the New York Times, David Brooks writes:
Fifty percent of Americans over 65 believe America stands above all others as the greatest nation on earth. Only 27 percent of Americans ages 18 to 29 believe that. As late as 2003, Americans were more likely than Italians, Brits and Germans to say the “free market economy is the best system on which to base the future of the world.” By 2010, they were slightly less likely than those Europeans to embrace capitalism.
Thirty years ago, a vast majority of Americans identified as members of the middle class. But since 1988, the percentage of Americans who call themselves members of the “have-nots” has doubled. Today’s young people are more likely to believe success is a matter of luck, not effort, than earlier generations.
We’ve told you for some time that changes are coming…old models which don’t serve us will be challenged and replaced. Institutions who choose control over democratic models will find resistance. It’s easier to hire a public relations firm to manipulate citizens than it is to educate us and let us make an informed decision. Do they really think we’re too ignorant to make decisions which benefit ourselves?
You might see living examples tonight on stage for the Fox Presidential Debates.
We’ve written about income inequality, wealthier Oligarchs exploiting the working class and our environment. Socialism for the rich, austerity for the poor.
Globalization has allowed large corporations to become even larger than governments. Trade agreements benefit the richest Americans while the working class compete for jobs with low wages in poor undeveloped countries. The Middle Class has been crushed into the ‘working poor’.
To be more accurate, social scientists across the pond are talking about a new class of people called a “precariat”. Look closely at how they are defined:
The precariat has emerged from the liberalisation that underpinned globalisation. Politicians should beware. It is a new dangerous class, not yet what Karl Marx would have described as a class-for-itself, but a class-in-the-making, internally divided into angry and bitter factions.
It consists of a multitude of insecure people, living bits-and-pieces lives, in and out of short-term jobs, without a narrative of occupational development, including millions of frustrated educated youth who do not like what they see before them, millions of women abused in oppressive labour, growing numbers of criminalised tagged for life, millions being categorised as ‘disabled’ and migrants in their hundreds of millions around the world. They are denizens; they have a more restricted range of social, cultural, political and economic rights than citizens around them.
Remember, in a top-down managed world, the people at the bottom need to be compliant and manageable. This requires lots of directed marketing, public relations and propaganda.
So the precariat swells. Most in it do not belong to any professional or craft community; they have no social memory on which to call, and no shadow of the future hanging over their deliberations with other people, making them opportunistic. The biggest dangers are social illnesses and the risk that populist politicians will play on their fears and insecurities to lure them onto the rocks of neo-fascism, blaming ‘big government’ and ‘strangers’ for their plight. We are witnessing this drift, increasingly disguised by clever rebranding, as in the case of the True Finns, Swedish Democrats and French National Front. They have natural allies in the US Tea Party, the Japanese copycats, the English Defence League and the originals, Berlusconi’s neo-fascist supporters.
The “US Tea Party” is nailed as a “neo-fascism” front for which “populist politicians” (and conservative media) will play on their “fears and insecurities”. This was written four years ago. We’d say the US Tea-GOP Party is already there and we see it all across the South, Midwest and Northeast.
Tonight, we will watch 17 republicans compete for the hearts of the conservative media who will, in turn, promote and demote their presidential choices to a large group of misinformed followers who wrongly blame their government for our problems. The conservative media and the Libertarian Koch brothers behind the Tea-GOP Party have constructed a large web of foundations and think-tanks which peddles propaganda disguised as research.
As researched by Jackie Calmes for the Shorenstein Center:
As many of them concede, it is conservative media – not just talk-show celebrities Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, Mark Levin and Laura Ingraham, but also lesser-known talkers like Steve Deace, and an expanding web of “news” sites and social media outlets with financial and ideological alliances with far-right anti-government, anti-establishment groups like Heritage Action, Americans for Prosperity, Club for Growth and FreedomWorks. Once allied with but now increasingly hostile to the Republican hierarchy, conservative media is shaping the party’s agenda in ways that are impeding Republicans’ ability to govern and to win presidential elections. “These people, practically speaking, are preventing the Republican Party from governing, which means they’re really preventing it from becoming a presidential party as well,” said Geoffrey Kabaservice, author of Rule and Ruin: The Downfall of Moderation and the Destruction of the Republican Party, from Eisenhower to the Tea Party, and himself a Republican.
As European studies show, our global society is fractured by class as a result of ‘free market’ neoliberalism which separates society into a Darwinian “survival of the fittest” competition where the rich get to rig the game. Instead of pulling our country together to combat these policies, the conservative media is tearing us further and further apart.
In conclusion, here is a snippet taken from Wikipedia on the failings of neoliberalism – please read the words slowly since they connect neoliberalism, social stratification and the resulting precariat. If our policies since the late 70’s to early 80’s through today has created a class war between labor and capital, the only logical solution would be to strengthen our government (public sector) to protect the people from capitalists. Instead, our government is owned by the capitalists through campaign contributions, lobbying interests, etc. (bribery):
In some cases, the poor may have practically no rights at all if their income falls below the levels necessary to access the law and unbiased sources of information, while the very wealthy may have the ability to choose which rights and responsibilities they bear if they can move themselves and their property internationally, resulting in social stratification, also known as class. This alleged tendency to create and strengthen class has resulted in some (most famously David Harvey[85]) claiming that neoliberalism is a class project, designed to impose class on society through liberalism. Economist David M. Kotz contends that neoliberalism “is based on the thorough domination of labor by capital.”[119] The emergence of the ‘precariat‘, a new class facing acute socio-economic insecurity and alienation, has been attributed to the globalization of neoliberalism.
As you’ll hear tonight, the conservative media has turned the people against the government. Our government isn’t the enemy – it’s the only cure to reverse the poor policy decisions over the past three decades.
