Thursday, September 2, 2010

Glenn Beck's Glasses Lead the Nation...

unless you, my progressive and/or Democratic compatriots, vote.

Ah, the run-up to the midterms! Fall is in the air. That means time to exploit 9/11 for political opportunity! Blame Obama and march to victory!

Overthrowing the government is good. But remember to propagandize correctly. "Take back the country!" "Patriot points"!

Hold a mass meeting at the Lincoln Memorial on 8/28, the same place and day as Martin Luther King when he gave his "I have a dream" speech, then deny disingenuously that you are doing that. If someone happens to mention that fact, say, "THEY are accusing me of stealing the date. How dare they?" Who are THEY? Subtext subtext subtext.

Ooo, the tea party. They hang on Sarah Palin's every tweet. Those tweets, they sure are perky and ample. Appeal the 14th amendment. Hell, appeal the Civil Rights Act. However, thank God it was fought for with blood, sweat and tears in the first place. Otherwise Glenn Beck couldn't usurp the symbolic importance of MLK and present himself as the strong man leader of the aggrieved white people who respond to his dog whistle methods and think of themselves as "slaves" to Obama's "plantation owner" strategies.

This is the grass roots party that's created and financed by the fossil fuel/chemical billionaire Koch brothers. And their agenda is not populist. In the August 30, 2010 article in the New Yorker, Jane Mayer , one of the best investigative reporters left, spells it out:

With his brother Charles, who is seventy-four, David Koch owns virtually all of Koch Industries, a conglomerate, headquartered in Wichita, Kansas, whose annual revenues are estimated to be a hundred billion dollars. The company has grown spectacularly since their father, Fred, died, in 1967, and the brothers took charge.

The Kochs operate oil refineries in Alaska, Texas, and Minnesota, and control some four thousand miles of pipeline. Koch Industries owns Brawny paper towels, Dixie cups, Georgia-Pacific lumber, Stainmaster carpet, and Lycra, among other products. Forbes ranks it as the second-largest private company in the country, after Cargill, and its consistent profitability has made David and Charles Koch—who, years ago, bought out two other brothers—among the richest men in America. Their combined fortune of thirty-five billion dollars is exceeded only by those of Bill Gates and Warren Buffett.

The Kochs are longtime libertarians who believe in drastically lower personal and corporate taxes, minimal social services for the needy, and much less oversight of industry—especially environmental regulation. These views dovetail with the brothers’ corporate interests. In a study released this spring, the University of Massachusetts at Amherst’s Political Economy Research Institute named Koch Industries one of the top ten air polluters in the United States.


Maybe you're disappointed in Obama. Maybe he's a captive of corporate interests. But VOTE anyway, you goddamned Democrats. I didn't want Obama. But I voted for him anyway.

As the angry Republicans eagerly vote out the incumbents, remember who their puppetmasters are. And they are much, much worse.

No comments: