Hope that title caught your attention... lol...
Mound of Sound has a great write-up about the American financial debacle, and the class struggle that has plagued that country for decades...
There was one statement that really stands out - because of the mirror image which is occurring in Canada...
"Another reason is that anyone who talks about this is branded a "liberal" and, to many Americans, liberal = elitist = socialist = revolutionary = traitor. They get fed that nonsense every day."
It is starting to happen here in Canada - the branding of "elitist liberal". What gets me is that this sells well to anyone who has NO KNOWLEDGE of politics or civics. It is economic conservatives - old money Canada - who are the true elitists. Those mega-millionaires who don't think twice about putting on a $100,000 birthday party for their one-year-old. The NeoCon propagandists have completely bastardized the dictionary definition of "conservative" and "elite". How? It's easy:
1) Dumbing down of the population (If you don't know who the true elite are, you can't make them your target). Expanding on #1: A lot of small town Canada and middle America look to their corner store owner, plumber, or local doctor as one of the "elite". Wealth is relative, and we see fairly well-to-do middle classers as the "rich".
2) The real "rich" - the corporate robber-barons - then look for a scapegoat within the population... Who will question us? Who will challenge the means by which we obtain our wealth? Who will expose our system as the farce that it is? It will be the intellectual classes - the lawyers, the teachers, the professors, the educated working classes. The rich go ahead and brand these folks as "liberal, intellectual, elitists".
3) Once the "scapegoat class" is determined, it is easy to unleash the conservative-owned media on them. You can lead with stories on a Fox News, or Global, or in the "National Pest", then watch as other - usually more "balanced" media outlets scramble to pick up on the story, or the editorializing. Big Oil and other mega-advertisers - who make up a bulk of ads in these media sources - then exert their own pressure: "We won't run an ad in a section about being green", "We dislike the take this editorialist took on item x..." Slowly, with pressure from the corporate world, the term "liberal elitist" stands out, and becomes standard nomenclature.
Our politics used to be of a civilized nature. Civilized discourse in an orderly setting run with British Parliamentary protocol. There was respect for the institution, and respect for one another. Conservative theologians preached about the attack on the word "liberal" long ago. The strategy was to constantly use the term in a negative context. Make the very use of the word vulgar, profane, and basically an insult...
We need to turn the tables - make "conservative" a bad word. We have more than enough "ammo", with all the scandals, but more importantly the financial mismanagement of Western economies, and the transfer of wealth away from the middle classes to the "uber-riche". But we need our own media help to do this. The MSM (main stream media) will always imitate the neighbors to the South and protect their owners. We also have a deluge of crap programming (for lack of a better word) that emphasizes this ideology, sneaking up through the airwaves - helped by cable and satellite providers who love the cheap programming, and, more importantly, the advertising that comes with it. A group of us are looking to establish a "cooperative" newspaper in the Lower Mainland as an alternative to the big corporate papers. Even the little community papers are owned by conglomerates... so, for now, the "new media" will be the only path.
In the mean time, we need to hammer back at the Conservatives every time they bark about what they'd like people to think of us... We need to go tit for tat, ensuring that if they call us "elitist" we include elitist in every phrase in which we say "conservative". We can throw in a few quips about "terrible Conservative fiscal record", etc.
It's a marketing staple - the repetition of a phrase to enable "buyer recall". Not sure why we aren't feasting on these great available soundbytes right now?
Time for some action.
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