Like a snipe hunt the American worker was left holding the bag with promises of, you just wait, a better job will be right along, you just keep holding the bag open. The President offers tax cuts for new product development and then sends a trade delegation to India. The public pays at the front door and at the back door too.

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We have suffered no meteor strike which has reduced the surface of our country to that of the moon. Nor are we fighting off foreign invaders intent on reducing us to slavery. Yet our urban landscape is being reduced to rubble and our people wander the streets aimlessly and pointlessly looking for income. This isn't Pearl Harbor, this is Valley Forge, a long slow, cold, twilight campaign intent upon reducing the armies of workers through poverty, loss and despair.

Were these invaders lead by a pot bellied despot or lectern pounding dictator it would be far easier to focus our anger and national resolve. This is a national campaign, this is war! Whether you realize it and understand it, this is a conflict for the soul of this nation. No different than that conflict fought in 1861, it is a battle to determine who will run this country and who shall be its slaves.

These issues are not new, they are old. The European pioneers who flooded America's prairies did so to escape the land barons, the feudal potentates and the prospect of perpetual grinding poverty. They chose rural sod houses over city stone tenements. This is a continuing perpetual battle between capital and labor this is the anti New Deal, the same old raw deal. Free trade was sold to the public as an opening up of nations when it is a realignment of nations. America aligning itself with sweat shop nations and a third world wage scale. Aligned with China, Mexico, Indonesia and Vietnam. The American worker was told by Republican and Democrat alike that Free Trade was good for us. Then we were told that it was a done deal, get used to it and get over it.

Like a snipe hunt the American worker was left holding the bag with promises of, you just wait, a better job will be right along, you just keep holding the bag open. The President offers tax cuts for new product development and then sends a trade delegation to India. The public pays at the front door and at the back door too. Free trade is a hole in the pool and the water must always seek its own level. Can American's compete against workers earning two, three or five dollars per day? Can a man with a pick up truck compete against UPS? They forget themselves, the people run this country or will run this country. It is ours to do with as we wish, we can have Christmas in July or a thirty two hour work week. We can rebuild this nation as we see fit and woe unto those who try and stop us.

We live now in a Machiavellian nightmare, where funny things happen during elections, not once, but repeatedly. In 2000, a lawful recount was stopped by order of a Federal Court. In 2004 irregularities in Ohio, the public begins to get antsy. The public demands a clear winner, to prove the integrity of the system. Out of the mist a stealth candidate emerges, a quiet guy, good speaker, without much of a record to gauge his political standing. He faces off against a grumpy, angry three time Republican loser who openly avows that he wishes to continue the policies of the Bush regime.

Thus we were given the choice of the new and improved laundry detergent over the bargain brand. The choice should have been so simple, but as the campaign reached the summer conventions the bargain brand was still in the running. What did the Madison Avenue king makers do? How could they put new and improved over the top?  They gave America another reason to dislike the bargain brand, they chose as his running mate a dolt and a bubble head.

The media falls in line to praise the dolt, she's very popular in Alaska. Then the dolt can't answer simple questions like "what newspapers do you like to read? The importance of creating a phony narrative is critical to the illusion of really having a choice. Without the good cop, the bad cop is ineffective. To create a hundred faux issues to obscure the actual policies. Birth Certificate, Muslim, Bill Ayres, The Guiding Light, General Hospital, the Hulk versus Andre the Giant. Red meat to feed the partisans, to whet their appetites for the main event. A preliminary for the staged Wrestlemaina still to come.

What would John McCain do about health care? Health insurance exchanges for the poor and tort reform! What would John McCain do about energy? Nuclear power and drill baby drill! What would John McCain do about the economy? He'd freeze spending and cut social programs! What would John McCain do about the phony war on terror? He'd send 100,000 troops to Afghanistan and increase the size of the army and he would continue the Bush domestic terror campaign.

So America bought the new and improved soap but received... more of the same old soap. America was sold a ringer and a fraud. After two terms of compassionate conservatism America gets a compassionate conservative Democrat who cares about the people. The populace rejoices in a public spectacle on the Mall while the ringer wears his suit of humbleness and compassion. We have our clear winner! See the system really works for us! Democracy über alles!

The ringer picks a Federal Reserve protegee as Treasury Secretary, a career CIA operative as defense Secretary and Hillary Clinton as Secretary of State. What exactly are Mrs. Clinton's credentials for that job? A Goldwater conservative, college leader of the young Republicans who grew up to become a lawyer and sit on the board of Wal-Mart. These people are constructs, supermarket cardboard cut outs. They are whatever they say they are. As the policies never change, as the workers grow poorer and weaker, as their cities collapse and their schools decline.

Huey Long once proposed a tax scheme where the highest bracket for the rich was 100 percent where the poor received a subsidy. Where health care and colleges were free to the public. Long was assassinated, funny thing, in this country when you advocate causes for the people you better keep your life insurance paid up. Long's tactics have left his legacy scared with the names like demagogue and dictator. Ronald Reagan didn't play by the rules either and he is remembered as a statesman and great leader. Just more of the narrative, a once upon a time fairytale, the old show biz.

Under Reagan, taxes for the wealthy declined dramatically and the deficit exploded. Under George W. Bush, taxes for the wealthy declined dramatically and the deficit exploded! What's the ringers position? I'm going to keep the Bush tax cuts in place for the middle class, you know couples who earn up to five thousand dollars per week! You know, the middle class! But by god he's going to draw a line in the sand over America's wealthiest 2 percent! Then in a carefully scripted stage play. The ringer cries out "they got me!" and falls to the floor of the stage just as he did in the health care debate. Those dastardly Republicans have me over a barrel, I must give in to their demands of tax cuts for everyone, darn it all, shucks!

Then the ringer wearing his coat of responsibility, the coat of many odors, announces that we must rein in the budget and tighten our belt. Short term memory loss perhaps? Sixty days after the grand give away to the rich, we must cut Pell grants and home heating subsidies to the poor? This thirty days after saying America need 100,000 new teachers to remain competitive? A year after tens of thousands of school teachers lost their jobs the ringer says we need new ones?

The ringer host committee's in the White House on jobs and competitiveness led by the CEO's of the Fortune 500.

"The American people know from a four-year record that today there is only one entrance to the White House--by the front door. Since March 4, 1933, there has been only one pass-key to the White House. I have carried that key in my pocket. It is there tonight. So long as I am President, it will remain in my pocket." Franklin Delano Roosevelt

Who hold that pass key now? Who are these actors upon your stage? Who speaks for Main Street and falling wages? Democrats? What Democrats? The rate of home ownership is falling and will soon be below that of Europe, the lowest level since the last Great Depression. Do you think that it is an accident? Really? Wages, benefits and property ownership all magically fall while wealth and power correspondingly coalesce?

"Of course, Socialism is violently denounced by the capitalist press and by all the brood of subsidized contributors to magazine literature, but this only confirms the view that the advance of Socialism is very properly recognized by the capitalist class as the one cloud upon the horizon which portends an end to the system in which they have waxed fat, insolent and despotic through the exploitation of their countless wage-working slaves." Eugene Debs

The powerful through media ownership have created a stage play, call it the American Scene or Uncle Tom's Cabin. Call it Karn Evil 9, it is a show and this is show business. Where the good guys and bad guys all work for the same guys. Where change is a slogan and hope is new and improved but where old man river just keeps on rolling. They lead you with a carrot and hit you with a stick, they let you fill in the blanks but they decide the questions.

Sarah Palin, Glenn Beck, Rush Limbaugh? A dog barks, a bird chirps,  the cat howls. Does their message matter? Not hardly. What matters is that the well being of the people of the nation is being disregarded. Their homes are being taken from them, their opportunities are being diminished and their children's futures are darkened. This is not an act of god but an act of man and so can be reversed by men and women. Like Winston Smith or John the Barbarian you must understand who is actually in charge and in doing so begin to understand the true nature of good and evil.

"Ten thousand times has the labor movement stumbled and fallen and bruised itself, and risen again; been seized by the throat and choked and clubbed into insensibility; enjoined by courts, assaulted by thugs, charged by the militia, shot down by regulars, traduced by the press, frowned upon by public opinion, deceived by politicians, threatened by priests, repudiated by renegades, preyed upon by grafters, infested by spies, deserted by cowards, betrayed by traitors, bled by leeches, and sold out by leaders, but notwithstanding all this, and all these, it is today the most vital and potential power this planet has ever known, and its historic mission of emancipating the workers of the world from the thraldom of the ages is as certain of ultimate realization as is the setting of the sun." Eugene V. Debs

Don't want to be an American idiot.
Don't want a nation under the new media
And can you hear the sound of hysteria?
The subliminal mind f*ck America.

Welcome to a new kind of tension.
All across the alien nation.
Where everything isn't meant to be okay.
Television dreams of tomorrow.
We're not the ones who're meant to follow.
For that's enough to argue.

Well maybe I'm the f*ggot America.
I'm not a part of a redneck agenda.
Now everybody do the propaganda.
And sing along to the age of paranoia.

Welcome to a new kind of tension.
All across the alien nation.
Where everything isn't meant to be okay.
Television dreams of tomorrow.
We're not the ones who're meant to follow.
For that's enough to argue.

Don't want to be an American idiot.
One nation controlled by the media.
Information age of hysteria.
It's calling out to idiot America.

Welcome to a new kind of tension.
All across the alien nation.
Where everything isn't meant to be okay.
Television dreams of tomorrow.
We're not the ones who're meant to follow.
For that's enough to argue.
 
B. J. Armstrong

Authors Bio:

I who am I? Born at the pinnacle of American prosperity to parents raised during the last great depression. I was the youngest child of the youngest children born almost between the generations and that in fact clouds and obscures who it is that I am really.

Given a front row seat for the generation of the 1960's I lived in Chicago in 1960. My father was a Democratic precinct captain, my mother an election judge. His father had been a Union organizer and had been beaten and jailed for his efforts. His first time in jail was for punching a Ku Klux Klansman during a parade in the 1930's. I never felt as if I was raised in a family of activists but seeing it print makes me think, yes. That is a part of who I am.

We find ourselves today living in a world treed by the hounds of madness, a complicit media covering contrite parties. Multilevel media, giving more access to communication yet stunting actual communication. More noise, less voice, more sound less music, more law less justice, more medicine less life.