The next hostage in the brutal War on America by the Rising Right Wing has been taken: it is emergency funds for FEMA needed to replenish money expended for a rash of recent natural disasters including hurricane Irene.
The seeds for this were sowed during and after Katrina when the right-wing email underground was circulating hate messages about the victims in New Orleans, with a heavy focus on their skin color, and many comments about their dependency on the federal system of largesse.
These sentiments are now coming to fruition as more former working class Americans are feeling the terror of financial insecurity in the form of foreclosures, impending job losses, cancelled credit lines, and the demoralizing absence of any hiring. The frustration and hopelessness creates a great deal of anger. This rage turns against anyone who they see as getting a free ride.
So the Rising Right Wing regularly throws out new targets for rage to the people: immigrants, public employees with cushy benefits and retirements, incompetent tenured teachers, selfish unions that destroy business and undermine competitiveness, welfare recipients, federal bureaucrats with excessive regulations. These are all groups that hinder us and prevent us from winning the race to the bottom.
The race to the bottom is on. The Rising Right Wing will not rest until we are all day laborers. They have already transformed many industries into human wastelands where the majority of people doing the work are part-time independent contractors with no benefits, no retirement, and pay that does not support a family above the poverty level.
For instance, most universities now have the majority of their undergraduate classes taught by "adjunct faculty" who are paid a pittance, do not have any benefits because they are part-time independent contractors, and can do nothing but envy the ever-shrinking body of career-track or tenure-track permanent faculty. Another trend: many municipalities are outsourcing their services to independent contractors that hire part-time laborers with low pay and no benefits. The contractors make money, the municipality saves some money from their budget, and the actual work is performed by people who get less than a living wage and - of course - no benefits.
This race to the bottom then throws the people more and more into the public welfare system: food stamps, Medicaid, and so forth. Wal-Mart led the way in this, actually instructing their underpaid employees in how to get public assistance. As the need for public assistance rises, the public budget is then brutally cut. People go without healthcare and without their medications. They drive broken cars and sit in emergency room waiting areas for seven hours, only to have their last bit of credit destroyed by the hospital billing department.
How did it come to this?
It is my opinion that leaders of the Democratic Party had abandoned their political responsibilities decades ago and started to sell themselves as "third way" or "centrist" or "business friendly." Prior to Barack Obama, the only Democratic presidents were southerners who emphasized that they were pragmatists, non-ideological, and not beholden to the unions. Barack Obama has continued this trend. While he was elected in part due to his rousing articulation of Democratic values and principles in his presidential campaign, once he took office he tacked a different course. I am most disappointed and disheartened that he again and again made statements about economic policy that came right out of the playbook of the Rising Right Wing (e.g. equating the United States government with families who have to tighten their belts to balance their budgets) and that he offered up Social Security and Medicare as sacrificial lambs to be slaughtered in the ever growing War on the United States Government by the Rising Right Wing.
He reminds me of a man standing in a swamp surrounded by alligators, throwing out pieces of meat. He knows that when he runs out of meat, the alligators will eat him.
Democrats have ceded the field of ideas and values to the opposition for decades. Now we see the result.