Americans love fast. Fast cars. Fast food. Fast information. You can write killer investigative news and get 10,000 reads or put out a meme and get 200,000. That is, if it is attention-grabbing enough.
So how do progressives beat back the billions bad billionaires blow to feed Fox fear frenzies?
DemoCat.
DemoCat is an adorable, slightly sad kitty. Why is Democat sad? Because the majority of progressively-minded Americans spend hours grazing on empty calorie McMemes while their country is going down in flames fanned by a few billionaires wanting to return America to the white-Right 1% domineered nation that existed before the Great Depression and the New Deal.
It's like watching a fire break out in your house, and standing out on the lawn taking selfies in front of it while it burns.
Democrats have committed a lot of time and money into branding the Koch Brothers as the poster children bogeymen of the 1%. Meanwhile their less visible friends, like the DeVos family (AmWay), the Waltons (Walmart), the Coors (Miller, Coors, Blue Moon et al) and the Mellon-Scaifes (Mellon Banking,Newspapers,Oil/Raw Materials), whose contributions to "the cause" are equally or more egregious violations of your rights and freedoms as an American citizen, don't even make the radar.
It is maddening to see really good journalists like Rachel Maddow, who have great research teams, repeatedly not dig deep enough to get to the WHO IS FUNDING AND COORDINATING the Right Wing media attacks that roll out in goose-stepping consistency from Fox and friends.
It's like the news truck rolling up and ranting about how you are standing on the lawn taking selfies in front of your burning house rather than reporting on the cause of the fire.
Last week we had one of those moments. Richard "Dickie" Mellon-Scaife, a titan of Right Wing funding, died on July 3rd. The obits in the New York Times and elsewhere were bits and pieces, and pushed back into the paper because Dickie was a shadow-warrior with little public awareness. It took me a week just to get the Huffington Post to pop up my anti-obit on the guy. His pet projects, however, are legend.
Watergate. Whitewater. Westmoreland.
Yeah, you've heard of a few of his bits of handiwork.
After backing then-radical Rightie Barry Goldwater's presidential push and failing, Dickie:
- Gave a million dollars to the Committee To Re-Elect the President (CREEP), for President Richard M. Nixon. $45,000 of which was connected to a secret fund linked to the Watergate scandal;
- Put millions behind Ronald Reagan and the radical right infrastructure that was launched during his presidency;
- Funded the Gen. Westmoreland lawsuit against CBS to break down the lemming-leading 4th estate news division created by CBS founder William S. Paley.
- Funded the demolition of the news media backing projects as diverse as early right-wing talk radio up to his interest in the founding of web-propagandists like NewsMax.
As the commercials say, "But that's not all!"
Dickie Mellon-Scaife, whose money spills from the silver spoon of the Mellon fortune from the days of the Robber Barons. Wealth so great that the various foundations which he controlled, one in mother Sarah Scaife's name, spent millions on the infrastructure of think-tanks and astroturf grass roots organizations over decades to politiform America into the gridlocked mess that you see before you today.
Mellon-Scaife and his cohorts are the arsonists burning down the government. They paid enough to find the loophole in American Democracy: No one factored for anti-government forces within the government.
The reason that a minority of a minority party can dominate government is because they have the money behind them, and because that money is intent on destroying New Deal government from within.
How can these Teahadis waste billions and operate the worst Congress in U.S. history and get away with it? Through a vast network of propaganda outlets, most of which have funding/backing from guys like the Mellon-Scaifes and the Kochs, convincing the rats of the American electorate that the rat poison being fed to them is good for them. Big government, their only roadblock to power is too big. Eeevil.
The Kochs, Mellon-Scaife and their friends are of the John Bircher stripe of Libertarianism, that Ayn Randian selfishness and power grabbing that can only be stopped by one thing: Government.
The government was designed to keep us safe from enemies both abroad, and within. The 19th century capitalists who exploited child labor, slave labor, and pre-union low-wage near-slave labor, were the enemies within.
The Great Depression blew their empires apart. The New Deal, with its minimum wage laws, pro-union laws, and social safety nets like Medicare and Social Security, and the Great Society of LBJ opened the gates of opportunity to millions of poor, middle class, and racially discriminated Americans.
Now they want their toys back, and they have spent decades patiently restructuring our media and political system to take "their" country back.
Hamstring Democrats when they're in power. Slash and burn government agencies to the ground when they're not. Install über-Right justices to do their bidding and label more liberal judges "judicial activists."
Empty suits behind news desks both on television and in the dwindling fishwrap print news biz are wholly complicit.
Those whose companies aren't owned by a Murdoch or a Mellon-Scaife make billions of dollars off of the political ads of these core funders, and the multi-millionaires and dwindling unions that put out their own ads to counter the onslaught of money, particularly post Citizens United.
These 1%ers, this handful of the rich and politically committed, are the true agents of evil in America, the democratic kryptonite setting up lady liberty for Grover Norquist's ritual drowning in the bathtub.
If you've read this far, there is hope. Read about these people. Learn where their money comes from (Y-O-U) and shut down the floodgates of it that you give them to destroy your country.
Boycott Miller-Coors products and Walmarts and Fox anything and Georgia-Pacific products (Kochs) and Brawny Paper towels and whatever gives a plug nickel to these fascist families.
Don't do it because it's patriotic. Or it's the morally right thing to do.
Do it because DemoCat will be sad if you don't.
My shiny two.