With the midterm election on November 2, Tuesday, the phone lines in the USA are busier than ever before. I have been away from my home for the past two weeks. Today while checking my voice mail, I noticed that many of those messages waiting for me were all election related asking me to vote for various candidates. In the last three decades I don’t recall getting so many calls during a midterm election year. There is little doubt that this midterm election has become a crucial test to find out if the voters are fed up with the direction that America is heading under President Obama.
These days the American airwaves are also filled with matters relating to election. If you listen to the ultra-right radio and TV stations and believe their messages, you would think that Americans are tired of the Obama administration and that the nation is set for the Republican Party to take control of the both Houses in the Capitol Hill. It is a message of anti-Obamaism (as it calls the “doctrine” of president Obama), hatred and bigotry — all packaged under the sacred freedom of speech. On the top of this anti-government propaganda machine is the Fox TV, owned by the neoconservative media tycoon Rupert Murdoch. Under his malevolent guidance, Fox has developed its distinct character and has now become synonymous with Fear-mongering, Obstinacy and Xenophobia, and nothing else. It has a relentless message, which says that America is worse off today than ever before. Forgotten from its selective amnesiac reporting are the facts that more people have now jobs compared to the last days of the president George W. Bush, who had taken America into two wars, costing trillions of dollars. Missing from their reports and analyses are also that it was those two wars, still fought today seven to nine years later, that are the main reasons why in spite of the hundreds of billions of dollars of the so-called stimulus package, American economy has failed to show a quick sign of recovery. The recession was not a product of Obama’s policy; it predated his tenure by at least a year to George W. Bush’s era.
These deceitful media hosts and reporters tell us that the nation is now ready for a ‘revolution’ because the country is becoming a “socialist” country with a president who is “foreign-born” and deeply “anti-colonial” Marxist, and a “radical communist”. With TV commentators and hosts like Sarah Palin and Bill O’Rilley and many other open and closet bigot reporters, the airwaves are continuously bombarded with obscene and absurd claims, which by the way, even suggests that the Islamic shariah law is coming to the USA. And if you watch their programs, you will find that there are people, obvious dim-witted morons, who are obsessed with such absurdities. It is these FOXed people who are the neo-Nazis and Brown Shirts of our time that are willing to rally for the xenophobic causes of bigots like Palin, Gingrich and Graham.
The utterly disingenuous books and articles of Dinesh D’Souza’s are promoted by these ultra right-wing reporters and politicians as having all the right answers to explain the current situation and the mindset of the president of the USA. The message is: Obama is the most anti-business president to rule America. Even the president’s honest reflection that Americans "consume more than 20% of the world’s oil but have less than 2% of the world’s resources” is seen as an anti-American attitude. He is blamed for his ‘bad’ gene, inherited from a Lou tribesman, his Kenyan-born anti-colonial economist father, who had earned a Ph.D. from Harvard. So, president Obama, like his economist father, ought to be a Frantz Fanon- like intellectual who hates the west! [1-a]
D’Souza is an Indian-born, Christian writer, who has become a darling amongst the ultra-conservatives for his bigotry-ridden, pro-colonial mindset. As a beneficiary of the Christian/European imperialism, he obviously sees no evil with imperialism and has been brazenly hosting the carcass of the colonialism even when it is dead and rotting like hell. His revulsion of anyone questioning the robbery and plunder of colonized countries is quite unmistakable when he finds faults with senior Obama’s (the U.S. president’s late father) article published some 45 years ago. In his Forbes article, dated 9/9/2010, D’Souza informs us that in that 1965 article "Problems Facing Our Socialism" (East Africa Journal), Obama Sr. wrote, “Is it the African who owns this country? If he does, then why should he not control the economic means of growth in this country?” No one well-versed about the post-colonial history of Africa would disagree with the rhetorical question posed by Sr. Obama. However, to D’Souza and his foolish admirers America is now ruled by a person who, having lived 17 years of his formative life outside the mainland America and trapped in his father’s time machine, draws inspiration from the ghost of his anti-colonial father.[1-b]
D’Souza writes, “From a very young age and through his formative years, Obama learned to see America as a force for global domination and destruction. He came to view America’s military as an instrument of neocolonial occupation. He adopted his father’s position that capitalism and free markets are code words for economic plunder. Obama grew to perceive the rich as an oppressive class, a kind of neocolonial power within America… For Obama, the solutions are simple. He must work to wring the neocolonialism out of America and the West.” He continues, “If Obama shares his father’s anticolonial crusade, that would explain why he wants people who are already paying close to 50% of their income in overall taxes to pay even more… Recall what Obama Sr. said in his 1965 paper: There is no tax rate too high, and even a 100% rate is justified under certain circumstances.”
These so-called conservatives decry Obama’s plan to limit tax privileges to the rich. In the aforementioned Forbes article D’Souza writes, “He (Obama) wants to spend even more and is determined to foist the entire bill on Americans making $250,000 a year or more. The rich, Obama insists, aren’t paying their ‘fair share.’ This by itself seems odd given that the top 1% of Americans pay 40% of all federal income taxes; the next 9% of income earners pay another 30%. So the top 10% pays 70% of the taxes; the bottom 40% pays close to nothing. This does indeed seem unfair–to the rich.”[1-c]
D’Souza does not tell us that wealth is unequally distributed with the wealthiest 25% of US households owning 87% ($54.2 trillion, in 2009) of the wealth in the United States, while the bottom quartile (25%) hold no net wealth at all. The middle 50% of the country hold 13% or $6.5 trillion of the total household net wealth. There are more millionaires and billionaires today than anytime before in the USA. It is not difficult to understand why the wealthy section of the population (a small minority) either pays or should pay a disproportionate amount of the taxable income in the USA.
D’Souza promotes American exceptionalism — a theme akin to that of Nazi Germany under Hitler — and is critical of Obama for suggesting in a 2009 press conference that America is no more unique or exceptional than Britain or Greece or any other country. Obviously, such remarks of the president, the bitter truths, are unpopular with most hawkish Republicans who are reluctant to change their old Gung-ho mentality. In their inane insanity they behave like ostriches digging their heads in the sand, oblivious of the world surrounding them.
Moderate Republicans are now extinct in America. The new brand of Republicans is a chauvinist bunch who suffers from selective amnesia. If they win the election on Tuesday they want to repeal the healthcare reform. They want to repeal the financial reform so that the Wall Street crooks can return to their old jobs of robbing ordinary Americans, and wrecking the economy. They want to maintain corporate-welfare subsidies so that more jobs can be lost through outsourcing overseas. They talk about bringing change in the capital. But as we know from John Boehner’s admission (“I am cozy with lobbyists”) in 2006, change in Washington is the last of the supposed speaker’s agenda.
There is no denying that to many red-necked Americans the mere fact that the Oval Office is now occupied by an Afro-American (i.e., an alien in their vocabulary), is a traumatic experience. They crave for a change in the Oval Office. It is no surprise that the recruitment in white militia training centers has sharply increased since President Obama came to power. These home grown white militias in various parts of the USA, including those in Michigan, who raise their yellow flags, are now ready for a war, which they say must be fought against the government. Protesters in anti-government rallies have openly carried guns, and nothing can be done about such militant display in this country where citizens have the right to own guns.
In Rush Limbaugh’s radio talk show, he says, “We need to defeat these bastards (Democrats). We need to wipe them out.”
The comedian Jon Stewart has been touting the notion that the time had come for people of good will everywhere to end toxic political rhetoric. Last Saturday, he and fellow liberal comedian Stephen Colbert held a two-hour long "Restore Sanity and/or Fear" rally in which they riffed and giggled, strutted, sang and otherwise carried a big stick near the Washington Monument in the capital. Stewart said, "The press is our immune system. If it overreacts to everything, we actually get sicker. And perhaps eczema.”[1-d]
Obviously, the only way to stop the toxic political atmosphere would be to vote in Tuesday’s hotly-contested midterm elections and defeat the messengers and promoters of hatred and xenophobia. I am voting for the Democratic Party.
Note:
[1-a, b, c, d]. http://tinyurl.com/27yrzxn
