"It ain't paranoia if they really are out to get you."
someone smart
So the 1% get what they want, which is first and foremost, a permanent underclass, too exhausted by the constant day to day struggle of simply surviving to worry about battling it out for the 'up there'.
Yet that, the 'American Dream' (always in quotations anymore, or air quotes if speaking it aloud) is being held up as a goal, a castle in the air and a possibility for those who do everything 'right', even as that pie in the sky gets carefully moved out of reach, the loaded dice are changed with every throw, and the fine print gets smaller.
Actually, Barack Obama, the man so many of the Republicans love to loathe, is an absolutely stellar example of every one of their own tenets. Bootstraps, struggle, adversity, well-educated, family man, very religious, oh, wait, he is kind of showing up all the Republican goobers on the public stage at this point running against each other. All they can do is flat-out lie about him, so that's what they do. How can they hate him so incredibly much, yet not call it hate, and still call themselves followers of whatever gods they follow? I mean, except for the obvious, that he's half black but he is half white, doesn't that give him some white points in their eyes? Looking at that racism straight in the eye and calling it what it is, doesn't that give them pause to reconsider that decision to hate? Guess not. Can't overcome that Hussein, huh? Choose ignorance. I used to know a lot of people who did that. The irony of that is that they are choosing something that the 1% are forcing on them; free public education is, after first seeming to be a contradiction in terms, then a national joke, now is heading for endangered status.
Anyway, like meat at a dogfight, the 99% of people in this society are tossed chewbone semantics like 'unions bad', 'country broke', 'welfare queens', 'socialist', 'librul', 'commie', etc., and by losing control of the semantics, are kept at each others throats to keep them distracted from the utter rock-hard solidity of the, well, let's call it what it is, the ruling class. Now THERE'S a union.
I was a member of the Teamsters, and we had rules we had to abide by. These rules were publicly available and when people broke them, as they did because old habits were hard to break, there was a booklet that was published telling who did it, what rule, when, and where. Transparency, in other words. It was court ordered, of course, but they did it.
Where are the courts now? Comfortably in bed with the perpetrators, for the most part. Bought and paid for, because elections and appointments don't come cheap. It's human lives that do, voters that do, and rent-a-cops in gated communities that do.