I am continually frustrated, incensed, surprised, outrage, angered, and baffled by the vitriol spewed out by people on the right wing. First, we have the leadership of the right wing, politicians beholden to their corporate sponsors, trying to placate and enrich the already filthy rich, working to crush the civil liberties of the working and middle class in order to keep them from organizing, protesting, and voicing their concerns, anger, disappointment, and frustration with the powers that be.
The police and military are enlisted to intimidate and disperse protesters, fire tear gas, sometimes rubber bullets, pushing protesters around, blocking them into corrals, moving them away from the protest site, and using mass arrests to scare away any remaining protesters. The media, in the service of their corporate masters, portray these protesters and ordinary civilians as dangerous anarchists (as if all anarchists are the same). It is made to look like chaos, violence, and mayhem have broken out. Selective editing of video footage is employed, along with exaggeration, implication, and lying, in order to justify the violence, denial of rights and freedoms (as layed out in both the Canadian Charter as well as the US constitution), mass false arrests, beatings, and the use of military force against their own people.
These arrests are made under facetious grounds, detaining people for several days, never actually laying charges so protesters, never have their day in court, sending out a chilling message to all those who wish their voices to be heard. Raise your voice, and you will be detained, humiliated, beaten, prevented from protesting, and then let go without ever getting the chance, unless you can afford to file a civil suit, to have your day in court. This tactic is being used more and more in Canada as well as the USA (Ultimately Servile Americans).
This is only the beginning of the journey down the road to fascism, totalitarianism, authoritarianism, oligarchy, plutocracy, and rule by the elite.
How does a political movement so antithetical to the concept of democracy, so bent on controlling, beating down, and controlling the population, serving the interests of the few, rich, and powerful at the expense of the vast majority of the working, middle class, professionals, and the poor. How does a movement that is interested primarily interested in decreasing the taxation of the rich (which does not lead to trickle down enrichment, as the super rich tend to keep their money, invest it in stocks, bonds, and their own companies (but not in increased payment to their workers), while decreasing social programs, health care, social insurance, medical programs, education, and other programs which benefit society as a whole, but do little for the rich? You would think the lower 90 to 95% of the population (economically speaking) would be vehemently opposed to such a movement, yet somehow they have captured to imagination and the hearts of many of the very people it hurt.
Somehow, the Right has managed to convince the middle class that the Left is out to give away their money to the poor, that the Left will tax them mercilessly, that the Left will cause government to grow massively, creating a bloated managerial class that will intrude into their daily lives, that will restrict the ability of entrepreneurs to create new jobs, and allow the country to slide into a moral morass, forcing all women to have at least one abortion every five years, encourage teens to experiment with drugs until they find the right drugs for them, and in the US, decrease their ability to pay insurance companies vast amounts of money to insurance companies in order to gain access to substandard medical care, with most of their premiums going to pay for the massive amount of clerical work needed to sort out all the billing issues. In Canada, the Right wing believes that health care should be privatized, so the wealthy can pay to jump the queue and get a high level of health care while those of a lower class can get third world medicine, if any at all, because obviously, if you are poor, it is because God does not love you, or you have not worked hard enough in your life (because only the lazy are poor, it has nothing to do with the class into which you are born, the sort of education your parents could afford to buy for you, nor the amount you are willing to sacrifice your morals and values in order to flourish in the financial sector by taking advantage of others and loop holes in the law, manipulate the markets, and generally behave as a parasite on the economic system by sucking out value while creating nothing of value).
The Right has managed to do this by never campaigning on the actual issues that the intend to support. Instead the campaign on issues of morality, attacking the immorality of homosexuality (their point of view, not mine) and gay marriage (like that is an issue that really will affect how our economy will behave, will affect how straight people act, or will change the life of anybody to any extent, other than to make those homosexuals who choose to marry happy). They also make social programs seem like gifts to the undeserving, when really it is a safety net which provides a very moderate level of support to those who have fallen on very hard times. The right wing also makes sure to make the recipients of these social programs seem like some sort of alien beings, people very, very different than you and me, so that we forget the fact that we, ourselves, may one day depend on these programs to survive without having to resort to begging or crime.
The Right also likes to talk about their tax cuts, implying that the common man will benefit from these tax cuts, when in reality, these cuts are for the wealthy. What the Right has done over the last 60 years is offload the tax burden from the wealthy, those who can amply afford to pay income tax, to the middle and lower class, those who cannot afford it. At the same time, they have increased hand outs to large, multinational corporations, many of which are registered off shore in order to pay no income tax. Large portions of the research done by Universities, government institutes, and government sponsored programs is basically funding for research, the results of which are licensed out to large corporations to allow them to make huge technological advances at the expense of the public.
This amounts to socialism for the rich, capitalism for the poor.
…. More to follow at a later date.