Friday, August 7, 2009

Neo-conservatives, their town hall mobs, the media and America

Neo-conservatives, their town hall mobs, the media and America

It is both intriguing and also disheartening to listen to the cable TV punditry’s characterizations and frustrations regarding the anger of the US public over the health care debate. They are characterizing the people as a mob, and calling them political terrorists. I guess any group can be both, but to be a criminal mob they must be committing crimes, and to be terrorists they must be committing violent crimes aimed at political coercion. To talk loudly, to demonstrate anger and to demand that your elected representative show you at least the minimum of respect owed to taxpayers, is not yet criminal in the US. Of course, if the people harm or even cause another person to feel that their life or property is in any way threatened by the other’s anger and outspokenness that might be a crime, especially if threats of physical harm are made.

Now, let’s stop here for a moment and try to understand what is really happening in the United States. We have three hundred million people in the US of different races, religions and social-economic backgrounds. Politicians and especially neoconservatives are astute in the art of dividing and conquering this three hundred million people, almost at will, and without much effort. Good examples of this control and exploitation are the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. When the neoconservatives decided that the country should go to war, they exploited the fear and anger of the public following 9/11, created a Muslim boogeyman to use as a scapegoat and whipping boy, and took the country to war. The people that the media are now calling the mob and political terrorists, were then the real America, the patriots and the good Christians, when they were needed to serve as a constituency that supported the war, and the spending of billions of taxpayer dollars per month to carry out an illegal act of aggression against a country simply because the people of that country are Arab and Muslim, who control natural resources like oil and natural gas.

Neoconservatives courted the far religious right, empowered them, and even adopted their religious jargon and lingo to create a political language of hatred against Muslims and Arabs that was powerful enough to engulf, and incite an entire world into participating with what they called a war on terrorism, yet what is increasingly being revealed to be a war on Muslims and Islam. This was done in spite of the US Constitution strictly prohibiting the establishment of a state religion, ideology or theology. To many people, this Constitutional prohibition includes a prohibition against showing preferential treatment to any religious group or groups over others.

Yet, since it served neoconservatives to empower and to exploit the far religious right, the preferential treatment the religious right received was overlooked even by many Democrats and people on the left who were benefiting politically and financially from turning their heads to the pro religious fanaticism, pro war, and anti-Muslim and Arab sentiment that was poisoning our country. Hatred of Muslims and Arabs grew to such an extent in our country, that our presidential candidates could not even allow Muslim citizens to be photographed at their gatherings without fear of neoconservative reprisal. In exchange for the support of the Christian Zionists, and neoconservatives, US politicians almost never attempted to reach out to Muslims and/or Arab Americans in any substantive way, in comparison to how they fawned over Zionists for endorsements and votes.

Today, these same people are filling town hall meetings throughout the US, shouting down politicians and expressing their fears, racism and hatred and not surprisingly, it is no longer welcomed by the mainstream media. It is not welcomed because they are no longer railing against Islam and Muslims, or demanding that Muslims and Arabs be tortured. Now they are railing against health care reform, increased taxes and an African American President that they refer to as Hitler. They are now calling the Obama administration Nazis and Obama Hitler, using language that is clearly aimed at inciting anger in Christian and Jewish Zionists, who make up the majority of the far right. In other words, the Frankenstein created by the political elite to serve their desire to invade and destroy Muslim and Arab countries hoping to wipe out Islam and to take control of natural resources, has turned against its government master, not because it no longer shares the desire of neoconservatives to destroy people who are not white and not Christian or Jewish, but because they are possibly angry that the same political elite which they served and even sacrificed their children in wars to please, allowed a Black man to be elected to the US presidency, and before a Zionist Jew was elected to that coveted post.

Neoconservatives are angry because their crimes against the US and the world are almost daily being exposed in the criminal activity of organizations like Blackwater, and the scientific proof that Muslims did not commit the atrocious crime of attacking the US on 9/11 as they had claimed. Their Frankenstein, the religious right is also angry because their role in all of this is exposed, and their political clout is waning. They are so angry that they are oblivious to the fact that the neoconservative politicians, left and right are still exploiting their racism, religious intolerance and hatred, but this time it’s not to incite a fake war on terrorism, but rather it is to insure that the far right wing creates enough political chaos here in the US to prevent a new investigation of 9/11, and to make sure there will be no audit of the Federal Reserve, and no real political reform in the United States, or political success for Barack Obama, which means that health care reform must be undermined.

That is only one side of the story, and it is a side that should not be underestimated for its potential to drag our country into a violent civil war. The other side of the story, though not as complex is equally, if not more important, since it is essential that the political elite get it right in respect to dealing with what is the real silent majority in this country who have decided to be silent no more. They are not Christian right fanatics. They are American citizens from the poor and middle class who are fed up with political corruption, elite entitlement and being ignored.

These are the mostly uneducated blue collar workers of our country and their children, whose manufacturing jobs were exported to Zionist owned firms in India and Israel, and to communist countries like China in globalization schemes. These are the people who lost their homes due to the many mortgage scams and fraud that only came to light once our economy was nearly pushed over a cliff by a failure in the housing and mortgage market that cost the US taxpayer, the same people who have buried nearly 5,000 of their children fallen on foreign soil in wars that have been shown to be wars of choice, more than 700 billion dollars, much of which went to pay bonuses to corporate fat cats who had nearly collapsed the US economy due to their greed. These are angry people who are not religious fanatics, but who are frightened by what appears to be a final push by the political elite to eliminate the middle class and to force them into greater poverty, servitude and desperation.

For the first time in their lives many of these people are on food stamps, and have lost their homes and jobs and most importantly, they have lost their pensions and fear that they are also about to loose Medicare should there be health care reform. They feel humiliated and betrayed by the government.

These people are showing up at the town hall meetings and asking questions that might sound stupid to the political elites and politicians because the elites have become accustomed to listening only to professional corporate lobbyists while eating $100.00 per plate dinners and lunches at fancy restaurants and fund raisers. They have forgotten the sound of the voice of the American citizen, poor and Middle Class because they never talk to these people until they need their money and then its through controlled environments like cable TV and orchestrated town hall meetings where people are pre screened, and allowed to ask only the right questions, or on talk radio where the hosts control the dialogue to serve the elites, while filling the listeners’ heads with propaganda mostly aimed at creating fear of one thing, or another. And in these so called public debates, the citizen is always told that the only way to be saved from the latest and most recent boogeyman, is to give away billions more of their hard earned tax dollars. These people are real. Their anger and fear and frustration is real. They are not all white, or Republican or right wing. They are all Americans.

If the media is sincere in its desire to tone down the anger of this group of Americans, they should first realize that talking angrily to your elected official is not criminal. It does not make you a right wing nut job, or a member of a mob, or a cult. It does not make them political terrorists, or religious fanatics or Zionists. They are the silent majority that Jerry Falwell ignored. These are the people who were content to go to work each day, watch the game or go shopping on weekends, and put their kids through college by working two jobs. Their vision of old age includes sitting on the porch watching kids and cars walk and ride up and down crumbling streets. They vote when it’s important, but most stay away from politics because they know that they don’t really understand much about what is going on, and they know that’s not by accident. Their elected officials don’t talk to them to educate them about the issues, only to indoctrinate them. The politicians, rather than looking for ways to understand better the needs of their constituents, look for ways to put distance between themselves and their constituents, while making themselves more accessible to corporate lobbyists. These Americans are showing up at town hall meetings because they are afraid and angry that their silence and their willingness to just go along, rather than being rewarded, is being punished by what they see as a government that simply has lost touch, and does not care about our country’s poor and working class.

It is important that rather than allowing the media to chastise, criticize and attempt to criminalize these people that we insist that the media and the political elite learn to listen to them. Media pundits are claiming that these people are shutting down the political debate on health care, knowing very well there was never any debate, or discussion taking place. The people have been purposefully silenced by the corporate owned media who regularly stage town hall meetings and decide who will be heard and who will not. The people are shouting because they have decided that they will be heard and that even if their elected representatives will not talk to them, and the media screen them out, they will talk to their elected officials, and if necessary, they will shout.

It is time for the political elites, and the corporate owned media to realize that the people of this country are waking up and they are angry. It would be wise to use this awakening as an opportunity for all of us to reconsider the direction in which our country is headed and to take the necessary steps to heal its rifts and to restore the power that has been usurped from the people, our civil rights and liberties and hopes for happiness. As for the neoconservatives and far religious right, it is time for them to realize that their reign has ended and sanity is returning to America.