Oligarchs and Their Republicans: The GOP's Precarious Support

Raising the "Home Army"
They seem even more willing to fight when they're hungry.

Drat.  If you intend to have a coup, you'll be needing an army. The oligarchs did not overlook this necessity when they were putting the "finishing touches" on their plan to own the United States.

Even before the Reagan Era finally ended with the loss by Bush I, the necessary resources for the scheme were already in place.  The country's carefully divided population had already been invisibly prepared to provide the mechanism which would usher in the take over of the democracy and its final conversion to oligarchy.  

We can call it a coup d'etat, but we must be careful not to imagine it as anything particularly similar to that of an opportunistic Colonel with a handful of tanks in a sun drenched Central American capital.

No, the oligarchs' dream was to manipulate the American process until, finally, their oligarchy would, in a sense, simply be "elected" in a cheap sham roughly resembling a democratic "representational choice" by the people of the US.  Of course, the actual substance of the matter would be quite estranged from its outward appearance, but the results -- for them -- would still turn out in the end to be "roses, simply roses."

The "resources" mentioned above were to be an unexpectedly large demographic within the American population with a couple of very useful features.  Naturally, the campaign's detailed tactics would involve the managed influence of corporate religion, an obediently participating media, racism and a painful, artificially induced economic collapse.  However, a willing cadre of sacrificial "foot soldiers" had to already be present in the electorate to vote their scheme into positions of official political power.

They were.

By this time that same patient effort had also gradually created an expansive political force, all doggedly obsessed with similarly vacuous ambitions and values, which was spread all across the foundation of the political structure. The "governance competence" of this crowd would have already been highly questionable back when there were only one or two of them, but when hundreds or thousands of low level government seats were gradually packed with this type of office holder, the "image" of the politics of government became conveniently distorted.

This band of semi-literate hooligans became the norm, that is, shallow, dog whistle, reactionary "conservatives" became so common as to attain the political status of "normal."  The 2012 election firmly established that this crowd was now able, eager and willing to say and do anything without so much as raising an eyebrow among the exhausted electorate.

In the multi-decade strategy of the oligarchs, the long range "wet dream" was come true.  The super PACs, bulging with oligarch money, directed by corporate law firms and think tanks and luxuriating under the new impunity of the Supreme Court's legal cover, had free reign in the political arena thanks to this patiently developed advantage.

The nation's electorate had to become firmly -- and apparently, permanently -- divided if the economic take over scheme were to be accomplished.  When the federal elections became close to the 50-50 state of indecision, the influence of the oligarchs' great wealth was even further magnified.  When a race began as a 50-50 "toss up," the prospect of engineering the necessary corruption not only became much easier, it became even cheaper.

With a useless, obedient corporate media eagerly prepared to "groom the combat theatre" with relentless propaganda for months or years before campaigns, it turns out that voters were, as a consequence, predictably willing to make ballot decisions based on hear say, incendiary media entertainers, frenzied epithets from sold out televangelists,  puerile adolescent talking points, name recognition, race fears and the like.

Reactionaries

Please ignore the puppet strings.

The use of the term "reactionary" may, at first, seem like mere overly dramatic grumbling, but when the facts are examined, its validity is shocking.  By definition reactionaries are defined by reaction, and reaction is what we see.

The reactionary government and reactionary politicians so favored by oligarchs propose no new policy, solve no present problems and have only a barely perceptible, highly fluid evidence of volatile, changeable, pragmatic ideology -- an ideology very conveniently ill defined to "perfectly embrace" the next tactical goal in the latest moment of public opinion.

The general electorate of the US, already famous for tolerating a "wing nut" here and there among an otherwise fairly rational collection of elected officials, were clearly not paying enough attention.  The media induced a growing -- although largely unexamined -- pessimistic distrust of government.

Reasonably, the electorate had focused their attention on the behavior of candidates much higher up the power structure, but these hordes of "installed conservatives," over time, became like a tide at flood.  They -- along with their political accomplishments -- also became not only embarrassingly durable but duplicated in other political economies such as the EU and even in subjugated victim states such as Iraq and Afghanistan.

Now, these same radicalized -- and, it turns out, highly manageable -- ideological politicos have cemented themselves into an artificial profile of "commonality" with the result that popular perception of their grotesque, out of step, unilateral political position is understandably -- but incorrectly -- presumed to be that of a majority by the low information electorate.  The current crop of demagogic Republican US House members and Senators emerged from these humble beginnings.

The mischief, however, didn't stop there.

Driven by an essentially endless supply of billionaire money, a class of "elected" Congressional officers "sans conscriptions" [without constituencies] became the obedient hand maids to the oligarchic interests which placed and maintained them in power.

During the time that the "conservative" school board members and dog catchers were winning small town elections, the oligarch class began purchasing most of the commercial media corporations in the country.  At first the inevitable influence on programming content and blatant "editorializing" were somewhat subdued, cautiously mild and unobtrusive, but when the scheme had caught enough wind in its sails to exert a blanket control over nation-wide network policy, all restraint faded, and the US media became the useless, radical "play toy" it is now.

American oligarchs have now managed to insinuate their immense wealth into the domestic political process to an alarming extent, that is, to an alarming depth.  The 2012 Presidential election saw a handful of billionaires financing the major portion of Mitt Romney's campaign costs while Republican state legislatures effectively obliterated the voting rights of literally millions of Americans with state level voter suppression laws and other anti-democracy election gimmicks. This resulted in the current crop of total crack pots being permanently installed in their gerrymandered House districts.

The US House of Representatives wound up under an illegitimate Republican "majority" after that Party's candidates received around 2 million fewer votes than their competing Democratic candidates.  The US Senate became permanently paralysed under an onslaught of brazen rules tactics which would have been political suicide had they been so openly pursued as recently as the Reagan Administration.

The "Bubble" of Public Perception

Happily, "bubbles" break from their own weight...

The alarming mechanism of this damage is that its fabricated image of  a political division between populations with conflicting "deeply held" beliefs in the electorate is a deception.

Thanks to a decades long campaign conducted by the entirely controlled corporate media, the exhausted electorate of the country is now buckling under a dangerous and deviously groomed misperception.

At first blush it may appear to be a kind of ideological contrast between the more modern, realistic population of coastal and urban Americans as opposed to the regressive plantation nihilism of the pre-Civil War Confederacy, but it is actually a conveniently useful conflict based on very little beyond the craven manipulation of unexamined public opinion and founded entirely upon the public psychology of the electorate.

The "political reality" of the 30-40% block of "conservative" voters in the US electorate were defined by right wing think tank psychologists. Rather than emerging from sincere convictions, they comprise nothing more than a "manufactured demographic."

Every human fear and desire have been woven into a "catch all" fishing net to inflame, entrap and infatuate hordes of low information voters conveniently susceptible to propagandised horror stories, old racial tensions and religionist mythology while still remaining curiously responsive to the tatters left over from the old anti-Soviet rantings of the 1950's.

Although we might, at first, simply dismiss this phenomenon as nothing more than an unusual aspect of the always fickle American public opinion, we must now conceive a new understanding of it.  

It is precisely this public opinion construct which represents the "main engine" of the ambitious oligarchic scheme.  There are literally tens of  millions of American voters "filled to the gunwales" with this actively produced propaganda.  They hear no other voices, and, worse, nothing they hear is contradicted by anything they might have normally learned in the normal course of what had long been considered a normal public education.

These voters have almost no background understanding of the function or mechanism of American government.  They exist is a world devoid of actual facts about the history or philosophy of the American democracy.  The majority of this "voting block" has never experienced an accessible study of their rights and responsibilities as citizens.

These all would have normally been the foundation of what our country's founders referred to as "an informed electorate."

All this may seem like little more than a maudlin, overly dramatic lament about the precarious state of the democracy, but it must also be considered from a different view -- the view of oligarchs arranging the tactical resources for their take over bid.  All these fully indoctrinated, tragically propagandized, malleable. low information voters are the precious "ground troops" which are -- in the oligarchs' dreams -- destined to "vote in" the US oligarchy.

On a brighter side, however, if this propaganda wave were to falter before the final descent into political oligarchy were accomplished, all hell could easily break loose in a few minutes or hours.

Citizens of Kiev: Fully Awake [Image - RT]

You can always count on Americans to do the right thing - after they've tried everything else.
Read more at http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/quotes/w/winstonchu135259.html#AODyqeL1eHbF9O07.99

You can always count on Americans to do the right thing - after they've tried everything else.
Read more at http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/quotes/w/winstonchu135259.html#AODyqeL1eHbF9O07.99

"You always count on the Americans to do the right thing -- after they've tried everything else."    

Winston Churchill

You can always count on Americans to do the right thing - after they've tried everything else.

Winston Churchill

Read more at http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/quotes/w/winstonchu135259.html#AODyqeL1eHbF9O07.99

You can always count on Americans to do the right thing - after they've tried everything else.

Winston Churchill

Read more at http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/quotes/w/winstonchu135259.html#AODyqeL1eHbF9O07.99

You can always count on Americans to do the right thing - after they've tried everything else.

Winston Churchill

Read more at http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/quotes/w/winstonchu135259.html#AODyqeL1eHbF9O07.99

We may be approaching this moment. It's important for all of us to do what we can to bring this to its material fruition. Keep your eye on this blog.