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Tuesday, April 5, 2011

The Stockholm Syndrome

So the Republicans would like to cut $6 Trillion dollars from the deficit over the next 10 years, and they propose doing it without touching defense spending and continuing to lower taxes on the rich and corporations? This can only mean a full scale attack on Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, Welfare, Food Stamps, Head Start, Unemployment Insurance, Student Loans and Grants, and anything else that might conceivably protect working people from a downward spiral into poverty.

When captives begin to sympathize with their captors they call it the Stockholm Syndrome. Working class people in the US have been held hostage by corporations and their center-rightist stooges in politics and the media for so many years that many of them truly believe that up is down, and black is white.

That lower taxes on the rich are the only way to create jobs, that guaranteed health care for all is somehow un-American, that government programs only help "other" people, and that benevolent corporations will look out for them.

These are the people who listened to Reagan and cheered when he said that government was the problem. Of course, the clear implication was that the Federal government was helping "them" and not you. And we all know who "they" are, don't we? (The undercurrent of racism that runs from Nixon's Southern Strategy, through Reagan's attacks on "Welfare queens", right up to today's Tea Party is undeniable.)

They swallow whatever Fox News says without a second thought.

They rely on Beck, Limbaugh, O'Reilly and Coulter to educate them on the issues.

And all along they keep getting poorer, and angrier, and further away from "the American Dream."

These are the people who still think Barack Obama is the most serious threat to "our" way of life.

What can you do with people like that?

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