How and why Republicans attack Obama - it all comes down to creating a govt-for-the-rich

[Sarah Ibarruri]

http://billmoyers.com/episode/ian-haney-lopez-on-the-dog-whistle-politics-of-race-part-two/

For goodness sake, people are hungry. We're in the midst of a recession. There hasn't been a recovery for the broad middle. Why would we cut off stamps now? We cut off food stamps because it's part of this old rhetoric that food stamps is for undeserving minorities, and that this is part of a symbol of government gone amok. That's one of the minor dog whistles. Here's the major one. ObamaCare. Ostensibly, this is about healthcare. But really, it's about Obama and government policy. Obama himself has been subject to a lot of dog whistling, that he's foreign born, not a citizen, a Muslim. What's happening with the term ObamaCare is all of these insinuations are being attached to a government policy. The most recent one: ObamaCare makes you lazy. Right? Now, ostensibly, this is because if you finally have health insurance, maybe you don't have to work that second job. But conservatives have turned it around and said this is about making you lazy. And lazy, of course, is one of these racial code words for minorities.

The Republicans have a real stake in proving that government can't work. They need voters to be hostile to federal government. To see government as the enemy. Because that's the only way voters will support politics that actually give control of government back over to big money.

More than that. Obama's incompetent. That had been a conservative frame for a long time. But it was absurd. It just didn't seem to match up with this cool, composed and sophisticated, incredibly competent individual. But as soon as the government startup fumbled, that racial stereotype of incompetence could be attached to Obama again. And here's the other one that was attached. Remember Joe Wilson, when he interrupted Obama, he says, "You lie." Now, a lot of people said, well, that was a terrible breach of decorum. But very, but fewer people noted that's also an old stereotype, a stereotype of black mendacity, that you can't trust blacks, they're always lying and cheating and stealing.

So when you look at what animates the tea party, there are several different hatreds that are core to the tea party. They hate welfare. Especially, or particularly welfare that's understood as going to minorities. Not social security, for instance, but rather food stamps. Next, they're obsessed about Muslims and Islam. And they really see this sort of threatening, this external threat in the form of the Middle East, but also ostensibly an internal threat of Muslims coming into the United States. For example, this is Kansas passing its law that there shan't be Sharia law in the courts of Kansas. Absurd, except that it triggers this racial fear. Next, they're deeply concerned about undocumented immigrants, especially undocumented immigrants from Mexico. Finally, they hate President Obama. And Obama seems to combine both this sense of welfare, of being a Muslim, of being a brown foreign other, right? So all of these fears that animate the tea party movement at the grassroots level, these are racial narratives. They're racial narratives that say to people, if you want to understand what went wrong in your life, if you want to understand what what went wrong in America, blame minorities.

So, think about what a lot of Republicans are actually doing in terms of their policies. In terms of their policies, they say they're for limited government. But in fact, what they're doing is giving over control of the regulatory state the corporations. They say they want to shrink the federal deficit, but in fact, they're spending massive amounts of money either in tax cuts for the very rich, or in big subsidies that go to corporations, for example the farm bill that was recently enacted. Now, you can't get elected going to the American public and saying, I want to cut your funding for your schools, I want to cut funding for your social security, I want to cut your pensions. And I want to shower all that money on the very rich. You can't get elected that way. But you can get elected going to the American public saying, we're in mortal danger as a country because something has gone terribly wrong with our society. We see it in religion, we see it around gender, we see it around abortion, we see it around same-sex marriage, and we certainly see it in terms of welfare and criminals and illegal aliens. That's the language that a very extreme wing of the conservative, of conservatives has been using to skew American politics, but also to take over the Republican party. Republicans from 30, 40 years ago, would not recognize what the party is today.

[Cha]

1. Thanks Sarah~

[DJ13]

2. I'm not finding the text at your link

[Sarah Ibarruri]

3. If you'd like the transcript only, click where it says "transcript"

It's below the video. Let me know if you are able.

[DJ13]

4. Thanks, missed it the first time!

[Sarah Ibarruri]

5. You're so welcome! nt

[sheshe2]

6. Thanks Sarah. nt

[Cali_Democrat]

7. Yep. Republicans claim to want to shrink the deficit

but their policies of tax cuts for the wealthy only exacerbate the deficit.

The budget deficit has decreased dramatically since Obama signed the bill increasing taxes on the wealthy last year.

[Pretzel_Warrior]

9. love that animated gif

[Cali_Democrat]

11. Me too!

[Pretzel_Warrior]

8. kick

[gulliver]

10. You have to be senile or brain dead to vote Republican now.

Their party is the George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, Mitt Romney Party. And yes, they attack Obama and the government in order to gull people.

[freshwest]

12. I'm so glad to see this, Sarah! I've been harping on that part you emboldened there:

The Republicans have a real stake in proving that government can't work. They need voters to be hostile to federal government. To see government as the enemy. Because that's the only way voters will support politics that actually give control of government back over to big money.

It takes asking what is the motive of what I'm being told? Who is paying for it to be told?
Why should one assume it is the solution? Who benefits?

It's fascist propaganda, used to create what FDR warned us of:

The liberty of a democracy is not safe if the people tolerate the growth of private power to a point where it becomes stronger than their democratic state itself. That, in its essence, is fascism - ownership of government by an individual, by a group...

His VP Henry Wallace showed how they would do it to us:

The Danger of American Fascism

by Henry A. Wallace

An article in the New York Times, April 9, 1944.

From Henry A. Wallace, Democracy Reborn (New York, 1944), edited by Russell Lord, p. 259.

1. On returning from my trip to the West in February, I received a request from The New York Times to write a piece answering the following questions:

1. What is a fascist?
2. How many fascists have we?
3. How dangerous are they?

2. A fascist is one whose lust for money or power is combined with such an intensity of intolerance toward those of other races, parties, classes, religions, cultures, regions or nations as to make him ruthless in his use of deceit or violence to attain his ends. The supreme god of a fascist, to which his ends are directed, may be money or power; may be a race or a class; may be a military, clique or an economic group; or may be a culture, religion, or a political party.

3. The perfect type of fascist throughout recent centuries has been the Prussian Junker, who developed such hatred for other races and such allegiance to a military clique as to make him willing at all times to engage in any degree of deceit and violence necessary to place his culture and race astride the world. In every big nation of the world are at least a few people who have the fascist temperament. Every Jew-baiter, every Catholic hater, is a fascist at heart. The hoodlums who have been desecrating churches, cathedrals and synagogues in some of our larger cities are ripe material for fascist leadership.

4. The obvious types of American fascists are dealt with on the air and in the press. These demagogues and stooges are fronts for others. Dangerous as these people may be, they are not so significant as thousands of other people who have never been mentioned. The really dangerous American fascists are not those who are hooked up directly or indirectly with the Axis. The FBI has its finger on those. The dangerous American fascist is the man who wants to do in the United States in an American way what Hitler did in Germany in a Prussian way. The American fascist would prefer not to use violence. His method is to poison the channels of public information. With a fascist the problem is never how best to present the truth to the public but how best to use the news to deceive the public into giving the fascist and his group more money or more power.

5. If we define an American fascist as one who in case of conflict puts money and power ahead of human beings, then there are undoubtedly several million fascists in the United States. There are probably several hundred thousand if we narrow the definition to include only those who in their search for money and power are ruthless and deceitful. Most American fascists are enthusiastically supporting the war effort. They are doing this even in those cases where they hope to have profitable connections with German chemical firms after the war ends. They are patriotic in time of war because it is to their interest to be so, but in time of peace they follow power and the dollar wherever they may lead.

6. American fascism will not be really dangerous until there is a purposeful coalition among the cartelists, the deliberate poisoners of public information, and those who stand for the K.K.K. type of demagoguery.

7. The European brand of fascism will probably present its most serious postwar threat to us via Latin America. The effect of the war has been to raise the cost of living in most Latin American countries much faster than the wages of labor. The fascists in most Latin American countries tell the people that the reason their wages will not buy as much in the way of goods is because of Yankee imperialism. The fascists in Latin America learn to speak and act like natives. Our chemical and other manufacturing concerns are all too often ready to let the Germans have Latin American markets, provided the American companies can work out an arrangement which will enable them to charge high prices to the consumer inside the United States. Following this war, technology will have reached such a point that it will be possible for Germans, using South America as a base, to cause us much more difficulty in World War III than they did in World War II. The military and landowning cliques in many South American countries will find it attractive financially to work with German fascist concerns as well as expedient from the standpoint of temporary power politics.

8. Fascism is a worldwide disease. Its greatest threat to the United States will come after the war, either via Latin America or within the United States itself.

9. Still another danger is represented by those who, paying lip service to democracy and the common welfare, in their insatiable greed for money and the power which money gives, do not hesitate surreptitiously to evade the laws designed to safeguard the public from monopolistic extortion. American fascists of this stamp were clandestinely aligned with their German counterparts before the war, and are even now preparing to resume where they left off, after "the present unpleasantness" ceases:

10. The symptoms of fascist thinking are colored by environment and adapted to immediate circumstances. But always and everywhere they can be identified by their appeal to prejudice and by the desire to play upon the fears and vanities of different groups in order to gain power. It is no coincidence that the growth of modern tyrants has in every case been heralded by the growth of prejudice. It may be shocking to some people in this country to realize that, without meaning to do so, they hold views in common with Hitler when they preach discrimination against other religious, racial or economic groups. Likewise, many people whose patriotism is their proudest boast play Hitler's game by retailing distrust of our Allies and by giving currency to snide suspicions without foundation in fact.

11. The American fascists are most easily recognized by their deliberate perversion of truth and fact. Their newspapers and propaganda carefully cultivate every fissure of disunity, every crack in the common front against fascism. They use every opportunity to impugn democracy. They use isolationism as a slogan to conceal their own selfish imperialism. They cultivate hate and distrust of both Britain and Russia. They claim to be super-patriots, but they would destroy every liberty guaranteed by the Constitution. They demand free enterprise, but are the spokesmen for monopoly and vested interest. Their final objective toward which all their deceit is directed is to capture political power so that, using the power of the state and the power of the market simultaneously, they may keep the common man in eternal subjection.

12. Several leaders of industry in this country who have gained a new vision of the meaning of opportunity through co-operation with government have warned the public openly that there are some selfish groups in industry who are willing to jeopardize the structure of American liberty to gain some temporary advantage. We all know the part that the cartels played in bringing Hitler to power, and the rule the giant German trusts have played in Nazi conquests. Monopolists who fear competition and who distrust democracy because it stands for equal opportunity would like to secure their position against small and energetic enterprise. In an effort to eliminate the possibility of any rival growing up, some monopolists would sacrifice democracy itself.

13. It has been claimed at times that our modern age of technology facilitates dictatorship. What we must understand is that the industries, processes, and inventions created by modern science can be used either to subjugate or liberate. The choice is up to us. The myth of fascist efficiency has deluded many people. It was Mussolini's vaunted claim that he "made the trains run on time." In the end, however, he brought to the Italian people impoverishment and defeat. It was Hitler's claim that he eliminated all unemployment in Germany. Neither is there unemployment in a prison camp.

14. Democracy to crush fascism internally must demonstrate its capacity to "make the trains run on time." It must develop the ability to keep people fully employed and at the same time balance the budget. It must put human beings first and dollars second. It must appeal to reason and decency and not to violence and deceit. We must not tolerate oppressive government or industrial oligarchy in the form of monopolies and cartels. As long as scientific research and inventive ingenuity outran our ability to devise social mechanisms to raise the living standards of the people, we may expect the liberal potential of the United States to increase. If this liberal potential is properly channeled, we may expect the area of freedom of the United States to increase. The problem is to spend up our rate of social invention in the service of the welfare of all the people.

15. The worldwide, agelong struggle between fascism and democracy will not stop when the fighting ends in Germany and Japan. Democracy can win the peace only if it does two things:

1) Speeds up the rate of political and economic inventions so that both production and, especially, distribution can match in their power and practical effect on the daily life of the common man the immense and growing volume of scientific research, mechanical invention and management technique.

2) Vivifies with the greatest intensity the spiritual processes which are both the foundation and the very essence of democracy.

16. The moral and spiritual aspects of both personal and international relationships have a practical bearing which so-called practical men deny. This dullness of vision regarding the importance of the general welfare to the individual is the measure of the failure of our schools and churches to teach the spiritual significance of genuine democracy. Until democracy in effective enthusiastic action fills the vacuum created by the power of modern inventions, we may expect the fascists to increase in power after the war both in the United States and in the world.

17. Fascism in the postwar inevitably will push steadily for Anglo-Saxon imperialism and eventually for war with Russia. Already American fascists are talking and writing about this conflict and using it as an excuse for their internal hatreds and intolerances toward certain races, creeds and classes.

18. It should also be evident that exhibitions of the native brand of fascism are not confined to any single section, class or religion. Happily, it can be said that as yet fascism has not captured a predominant place in the outlook of any American section, class or religion. It may be encountered in Wall Street, Main Street or Tobacco Road. Some even suspect that they can detect incipient traces of it along the Potomac. It is an infectious disease, and we must all be on our guard against intolerance, bigotry and the pretension of invidious distinction. But if we put our trust in the common sense of common men and "with malice toward none and charity for all" go forward on the great adventure of making political, economic and social democracy a practical reality, we shall not fail.

http://newdeal.feri.org/wallace/haw23.htm

Is this not what has been done? Are we not meeting the same challenges, forgetting our roots, having been made to feel jaded about solutions put in place to defeat this?

It's all been done by the first methods that Wallace warns us about here:

4. The obvious types of American fascists are dealt with on the air and in the press. These demagogues and stooges are fronts for others. Dangerous as these people may be, they are not so significant as thousands of other people who have never been mentioned. The really dangerous American fascists are not those who are hooked up directly or indirectly with the Axis. The FBI has its finger on those. The dangerous American fascist is the man who wants to do in the United States in an American way what Hitler did in Germany in a Prussian way. The American fascist would prefer not to use violence. His method is to poison the channels of public information. With a fascist the problem is never how best to present the truth to the public but how best to use the news to deceive the public into giving the fascist and his group more money or more power.

That this knowledge has not been screamed from the rooftops of this nation, that people's minds have been for taken in so decades now by the O'Reilly's and Rush's and the rest - it absolutely instills a sense of dread and terror for a person with an attention span longer that television trains people to have.

[ReRe]

14. There you go again, freshwest...

... could you please make an OP out of this? So many people don't understand what some of these "isms" mean. Yeah, maybe some won't read it because it "takes too long," or they've read it and understand it already. But even if only one person reads it and learns from it, then it's worth it.
Thank you so much for including it here, even if you decide not to make it a thread of it's own.

[Blecht]

13. Thanks for posting this

The most frustrating part of all this is that it is so obvious, but people still don't see it. I honestly don't understand it. The first part you put in bold above is irrefutable:

The Republicans have a real stake in proving that government can't work. They need voters to be hostile to federal government. To see government as the enemy. Because that's the only way voters will support politics that actually give control of government back over to big money.

It is so transparent, but the tactic works.

[ReRe]

15. K&R

Yes, and they've been at this for a long time, re. tearing down the relationship between the government and The People. Not only that, they've pretty much tried every wedge issue they could think up, and by damn, seems like none of them worked. Just when they think they have the people cornered, desperate for jobs and all, they find themselves cornered. They did it to themselves. They are the ones desperately desperate now, thus the TeaParty was born. They're ready to bring this 200 some odd year experiment called democracy to and end once and for all.

They are delusional.

[CJCRANE]

16. That sums it up. nt

[malaise]

17. Do not forget that the idea of destroying government is to privatize it

to themselves and their cronies. Listen carefully to Rick Perry's rant at CPAC

[Sarah Ibarruri]

21. EXACTLY! nt

[beachbum bob]

18. the average everyday Gop'er and their conservative veiwpoiont

takes small government seriously. To them its not about rich but about role of govt. The way it works out on the national level is another matter.

Don't be duped by over simplification. The average Gop conservative voter cares more about reducing govt which in effect is removing govt programs whether its food stamps, education grants, and most everything else that impacts the bottom 99% of americans.

[Sarah Ibarruri]

20. The reality is that the PEOPLE have to take back their government FROM the rich.

And that can't be done as long as we continue to allow ourselves to be duped by the RW mantras and propaganda BS about government being too big, immigrants being the real reason we're impoverished, etc.

The whole RW idea behind saying government needs to be reduced, is only and exclusively GOP propaganda

It's not that our government needs to be reduced. The U.S. is a gigantic country, and needs a huge federal government.

What the GOPers striver for, and their primary goal is (as the transcript says) not to reduce government so much as to trash government until they can flip the entire thing over to the 1%, and make it into a tool that will work ONLY for the rich, and run ONLY by the rich.

To accomplish this, the GOP invented a whole mythology and mantra about how U.S. government is "much too big" and needs to be reduced. In order to accomplish this, the GOP created a second mythology which claims that people of color, Latins, and immigrants are BAD (in other words, these people shouldn't be allowed to vote, and let's scare and demoralize them into not voting).

The reality is that the PEOPLE have to take back their government FROM the rich.

The GOP's propagnada tactics remind me of what happened in Nazi Germany. The GOP, however, have surpassed Joseph Goebels' genius at propaganda.

[Scuba]

19. Creating? I'd go with "sustaining".