Unfortunately, decades of hate-talk AM radio - beginning with Rush Limbaugh, followed up by the creation of Fox News by Roger Ailes - have up to this point irrevocably damaged our political discourse and cultural lines that have defined the many faces of America's past. I grew up in Astoria, Queens, a city that was dominated by an influx of Greek immigrants. If you make it down to Ditmars Blvd., you can grab some of the best Greek food America has to offer. Latinos, Polish, Irish, Italian, African Americans, German and many other cultural backgrounds filled out the neighborhood. There were many different religions represented as well, along with others that didn't really pay much attention to it. It was the quintessential melting pot of different cultures and beliefs that shared tight living quarters and for the most part lived together in harmony.
Obviously it was far from perfect, but there wasn't this toxic political divide between the groups--pitting right vs left, conservatives against liberals--that existed after the great right-wing transmissions began, fueled by corporate interests and political and right wing religious operatives. In the Bush decade, conservatives have been thoroughly conditioned by an endless drone of conservative voices to not only hate liberals, but to also wish them to be exterminated from the two-party system. Deleted, one might say in today's techo-daze. A good example of what I'm talking about is the differences that you see by the OWS protesters and the tea party operatives and how they have been portrayed by the MSM, CNBC and Fox.
The tea party has sided with Wall Street as epitomized by CNBC's Rick Santelli's rant on the stock exchange floor, which blamed the loser homeowners rather than the Wall Street excesses and cons that caused the collapse of the global financial markets, which in turn has ruined the world economies. And that means grief and hardship for the working class while the financial elites make huge profits. David Cay Johnson explains: First Look At US Pay Data, It's Awful:
There were fewer jobs and they paid less last year, except at the very top where, the number of people making more than $1 million increased by 20 percent over 2009.
Digby wrote an excellent op-ed for al-Jazeera in which she discusses the two groups and how different and deep the divide is.
Tea Partiers: The self-hating 99 percent.
Although the Tea Party and Occupy movement share surface similarities, they represent opposite world views.
They should be with us at this moment in time, screaming for income and economic equality, but we're the enemy. Rush Limbaugh, Billo, Sarah Palin and Glenn Beck say so.
