Middle Class Fear is the GOP's Best Weapon

Middle class worry has worked very effectively for the Tories in the UK, as this piece from the Guardian explains. In England, David Cameron, the Conservative leader who has been sacrificing programs for the working and middle class in order to protect the perks and benefits of the super-rich, is privately glad riots have broken out in London and Manchester. The violence takes his corrupt bargain with Rupert Murdoch, tabloid baron and owner of FoxNews and the Wall Street Journal, out of the news. And it also gins up the worries of an already worried middle and working class, people who feel insecure about their jobs are more pliable when violence threatens everything they've earned

Meanwhile, in this country, Republicans are delivering exactly the economy they want, as this article from Alternet.org explains. Stagnant, insecure, fragile, panicky. They love it. Fearful people are more obedient and more easily fooled. People working their brains out trying to stay even aren't as likely to ask hard questions. They are more likely to watch the propaganda programming on FoxNews that juices their fears and directs them not at the causes but at each other.

I've been pushing the word "HOARDING" as it pertains to the trillions corporations and super rich investors are sitting on. Is it any different than hoarding food in a famine or water in a drought? I'm glad to see the word is being properly applied.

Another article, by a professor at UC Santa Cruz, with useful charts and graphs, explains the poisonous asymmetry in the American economy. Imbalance causes instability. On a fundamental level, worried workers make poor consumers. What ought to worry Main Street is that the Big Boys don't care much about America. Their toast is buttered by growing prosperity in other countries. How patriotic is that?