How are such people ever going to achieve Ultimate Cosmic Power with their minds all wrapped up in their itty bitty living space?
More correlations here by Jim Moss [and a tip o'teh tinfoil to Avedon]. Notice any trends?
The electoral map:
How many of us live in poverty:
And finally, income inequality:
It's like this:
"...If you overlay an education map with the rates of high school graduations and the numbers who pursue and graduate from post secondary school programs, you will get a fairly close correlation with the poverty and income inequality maps.
The worse off people are in the areas of meeting basic needs - adequate and consistent/reliable nutrition, clean water, safe and comfortable shelter, safe and reliable transportation, competent schools and education - the more likely it is that people will not have developed even basic competencies in critical thinking, using evidence in order to make decisions and being able to have and to make choices which are based on long term goals.
People who are impoverished in one or more essential survival needs must think only in the immediate short term. They can’t think long term as they have no or inadequate control over the chaos that rules and defines their lives.
They don’t envision an American dream. They (we) are trying to simply survive an ongoing nightmare of hunger, want, joblessness, societal condemnation, inadequate or no housing, and no ability to envision a future any different..."
Joe Vecchio also calls it:
...From McCarthy to Nixon to Reagan to Gingrich to Bush, the right wing has used fear and divisiveness to demonize Americans who don't agree with their politics. They've been desperately trying to put an end to the New Deal and re-establish the laissez-faire system that was in place before FDR's sweeping changes. As the years have gone by and they grabbed more and more power, they've gotten nastier and more delusional. For the leaders of this movement, the corporatists who believe the country belongs to them and them alone and who want the government to act for them and no one else, that's worked out well. They got capitalism when they made a profit and socialism when they took a loss.
For the racists and the proudly ignorant who allowed themselves to be manipulated by these corporate snake oil salesmen because they were belaboring under the false assumption that they could become snake oil salesmen themselves, it hasn't been so good. The poorest among them found their salaries going down or remaining the same (when their jobs weren't being outsourced altogether), their taxes going up slightly and the cost of living going through the roof. And thanks to a well-funded campaign of corporate propaganda, they were manipulated into blaming "other" poor people for what was going on. Some of them are beginning to understand who the real crooks are, many others, having invested so much of their lives believing the propaganda, have doubled down on their hatred and refused to accept it...
Let's be clear about this: The GOP leadership and their chief financial backers loathe the very idea of democracy. Whatever complexities conservatism may have, it always boils down to a single, simple statement: some people are better than others. The rest of us, who desire less ambitious things in life, are told that we should keep our mouths shut and be happy for what our betters deign to give us. When the right wing talks about "freedom", what they mean, what they've always meant, is the freedom for them to pull off whatever scam they're currently engaged in to separate the rest of us from our money, or to exploit us for their profit. And the only way to prevent that is with the balancing power of government, and a society that recognizes and understands the important and necessary balance between private and public institutions...
Poor people of color at least have the focus of race to show them who their real oppressors are. Poor whites don't even have that. In fact, rich whites since the 1600s in America have used race to keep both poor whites and poor blacks in their place. But while poor blacks see the whip in the hands of the Man, poor whites are too busy trying to be the Man to dream who's really behind the lash at their back.
The dreams these people do have are they dreams they are programmed to have. They have the dreams of acquisition but lack the knowledge to attain it. These people are the Led. These people are the cannon fodder for the Empire.
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