The Big Picture Conservative Machine

Work hard and play by the rules and you will succeed has been the American mantra for generations. But what chance does a regular American have when the deck is stacked so decidedly against him or her? Consider the modern-day conservative machine cobbled together not for the benefit of America, but for the benefit of the wealthy elite. What began as a memo in 1970 to the National Chamber of Commerce by Supreme Court Justice Lewis Powell saying that all of our best students are becoming anti-business because of the Vietnam War, and that we needed to do something about it. Powell's agenda included getting wealthy conservatives to set up professorships, setting up institutes on and off campus where intellectuals would write books from a conservative business perspective, and setting up think tanks.

Business folks took this advice seriously, coupled with Republican scandals that resulted in running a Republican President out of town.

Captains of industry set up non-profit think tanks like the Heritage Foundation, the Manhattan Institute, and converted earlier ones like the American Enterprise Institute and the Hoover Institute to benefit their own corporate interests. They carefully peopled these symbiotic organisms with the fruit of their loins, children with double doctorates carefully bred and nurtured to provide sustenance to the maw of the elite.

There are thousands of such organizations across America, located in every state, closely affiliated with the local chambers of commerce and genetically linked with Corporate CEO's who routinely make 500 times more than his average employee. The sole purpose of this machine is to maintain this outrageous imbalance of economic distribution, which bears no relevance whatsoever on the profitability of the company.

But it doesn't end there, since this is all quiet lobbying behind the scenes intended to nothing more than perpetuate Corporate wingnut welfare. It also extends into the airwaves, the so called fourth estate, also known as the media

The Telecommunications Act of 1996 was signed into law by President Bill Clinton. Hailed to foster competition, it in fact reduced the number of major media companies from 80 to six in twenty years. This was preceded by the death of the Fairness Doctrine during the Reagan Administration which demanded radio stations to provide balanced programming.

The birth of the mighty right wing wurlitzer had begun, and a cancer began to grow on the body politic. The right wing noise machine caters to the low-hanging fruit, the easy boogeyman, pointing at the dirty fucking liberal hippy as the irrational reason of all societal problems. Liberals want to take all the money from hard working Americans and give it to lay-about coloreds, welfare queens and illegal immigrants. The lazy and hateful ideology they spew is not countered whatsoever in over 90 percent of the country, according to Ed Schutlz, a popular progressive radio talk show host. This is backed up by a recent study done by a liberal think tank known as The Center For America Progress which shows:

the Center for American Progress concluded that 91 percent of weekday talk radio is conservative, compared with liberal content at 9 percent. The group, which said it analyzed 257 news and talk stations owned by the five biggest radio broadcasters, calls for stricter media-ownership limits and public-interest requirements.

In other words, a handful of media owners are effectively silencing the political voice of 70 percent of the people. One may say this is stupid, since advertising is the lifeblood of media and one should go where the money is. This is true. Since General Electric is a major media holding company, it is interesting to note that its PAC donated over $800,000 to the Republican party last year and about half of that to the Democrats, a pattern that is consistent in the past several years. But you won't find that on Faux News. They point to the fact that journalists give to the Democratic party 9 to 1 over Republicans.

This is one of those things that is fundamentally true while being simultaneously patently false. Stay with me here. One hundred and forty four "journalists", nationwide, made campaign contributions from 2004 through the first quarter of 2007. There are over 116,000 journalists in America. This is a toenail clipping of the body politic, not some rampant liberal press. Besides that, those who did contribute to Democrats were copy editors and sports reporters from sisterfuck Alabama, not editorial writers for the New York Times, or Washington Post.

We are not done yet folks, because even with armies of sooper smart lobbyists from think tanks, the fruits of the loins of captains of industry invading our state-houses and Federal government by the platoon, and a million decibels of rightard spew blasting "it's all about icky libruls keeping you down," still, even with all that, the best the mighty conservative machine can do at the ballot box is forty percent.

Hello Ralph Reed , James Dobson, and Jerry Falwell. These three, along with many other pious and upright Christianists preached intolerance and hatred against any and all that would oppose the Glorious Conservative Revolution. Indeed if one supported the babykilling sodomites, one should expect eternal damnation. No need to address the poor and downtrodden or environment or any other issue of society that was about to be gobbled up by corporatists on their way to an industrial lunch because that may hamper the millions of taxpayer dollars they get for "faith based initiatives."

Think I'm done? Hah, you silly blogreader! Even with armies of Doctorates invading Washington and millions in corporate PAC's flooding in being blanketed with a million decibels of rightard radio and the soothing dulcette tones of the Pentecostal preacher urging "vote Republican or suffer eternal damnation," it still ain't enough!

Enter massive purges of voter rolls and the privatization of voting machines with closed source software that flips votes on command and three minute waits in Republican precincts and eight hour waits in democratic ones and still, we have a sitting President who complained to the Supreme Court in 2000 that if Florida kept counting votes he would be irreparably harmed. The court agreed, which I guess means he would have lost. But he won by a one vote Supreme Court margin.

This is the Republican Party and how they came to power. The results are all around us. Strong on sales, short on delivery, unless of course you are a member of their trifecta.