THE PARASITES WITHIN US

…If a kingdom be divided against itself, that kingdom cannot stand. Mark 3:24

And if a house be divided against itself, that house cannot stand. Mark 3:25

These two-thousand year old bromides are as relevant today as they have ever been throughout history.
Currently we have a polarized populace. We have polarized politicians who can’t or won’t work together to address this nation’s almost intractable problems. We have vicious, malevolent hatred being propagated by Americans, against other Americans, with conservative politicians fanning the flames with a torrent of malicious and misleading attack ads paid for by big money interests on behalf of candidates for political office who have nothing of their own merit to run on. It’s a sad commentary on American society when one side tries to herald its accomplishments while the other side bitterly tries to cut them to pieces. We have a president who was elected by a wide margin of the electorate just two years ago but with at who large segments of the right-wing political class and the demographics they represent  direct a scathing, visceral hatred. Frankly, I don’t see any way out of this darkness.

For twenty-one of the twenty-eight years between 1980 and 2008 we've had conservative Republican presidents who between them have appointed five conservative Justices to the Supreme Court. These five Justices are Anthony Kennedy, Antonin Scalia, Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito, and John G. Roberts. Justices Scalia and Thomas, in fact, are not only arch-conservative but have openly political agendas. Scalia and Thomas attended a recent soiree thrown by billionaire Tea Party financiers David and Charles Koch, a gathering where Glenn Beck was a featured speaker and where “strategies” to commandeer the election with torrents of money to fund attack ads with the end goal to take down the president’s agenda and the President himself were discussed and planned out. Meanwhile, Thomas’ wife Virginia is a Tea Party activist and virulent arch-conservative, which raises the specter of Conflict Of Interest on the part of Justice Thomas!

Interestingly, the Citizens United Supreme Court Ruling in January 2010 that reversed major elements of the McCain-Feingold Campaign Finance Reform law and opened the floodgates for anonymous, unlimited attack ad funding by Big Business, Big Finance, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, and assorted billionaires such as the Koch Brothers through shadow "non-profit" front organizations was affirmed by the five Republican appointees: Justices Scalia, Thomas, Kennedy, Alito, and Roberts (no surprise there). The three Democratic appointees serving at the time of the decision, Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Stephen Breyer, and Sonia Sotomayor, along with Justice John Paul Stevens, a Gerald Ford appointee (now retired), all disented on this decision (no surprize there, either). The Citizens United ruling allows secret funding sources pour unlimited sums of money into the campaigns of their candidates for public office with an eye toward playing a determinative role in American electoral politics. The ramifications of this unfortunate ruling are visible to everyone of every stripe, and the consequences of this ruling appear to have opened the door to the take-over of the government by the radical-right fringe. This is an ominous development, to be sure. We have a plethora of phony “grassroots” organizations with innocuous sounding names such as “American Crossroads”, “Americans for Prosperity” (the Koch Brothers), "Club for Growth",“Citizens United”, “American Action Network”, and (this is a hoot!) “Americans for Job Security”, a Big Business funded organization favoring the outsourcing of American jobs. Another Big Business-funded organization is the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, which wants to see as many American Jobs outsourced as possible. These groups are flooding the airwaves with thousands of attack ads against incumbents of both parties in an attempt to install radical-right zealots into Congress. In fact, over a twenty-four hour interval over the weekend there were twelve-hundred 30 second attack ads against Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid on the three major network TV stations in Las Vegas. That’s one thirty second attack ad for every three and a half minutes on each of the three stations! The scary thing is, these attack ads are in support of Sharron Angle, the far-right, not-too-bright Tea Party ideologue. And the sheeple of Nevada are apparently being overly influenced by this excessive onslaught of negativity, as are the Tea Party sheeple across the country who are apparently planning to vote the Republicans back into power so they can further facilitate the Big Business Agenda of farming their jobs out to China and elsewhere. Moreover, the conservatives aim to crank open even wider the valves of the Big Money Pipeline carrying money from the poor and middle class to the rich and mega-rich. And as this pipeline continues to suck money away from ordinary people and flood the billionaires with ever more billions, and flood even more billions into the multi-national corporations so they can build even more factories in China and fire even more American workers, the specter of class warfare looms large. It makes you wonder, do American voters even have a clue? Are enough voters really that stupid as to think cutting taxes for multi-millionaires and multi-billionaires will coax them into hiring more people and putting them to work at good-paying jobs? They say he who doesn’t remember the past is condemned to repeat it. The last twenty-eight years should have been a lesson. But, alas, the American voters have developed a case of amnesia, they've been duped right straight up out of their underwear, or have been beaten into submission by the ongoing and relentless fusillades of right-wing attack ads dominating this election cycle.

So, we are faced with a virulently polarized society, a society where reason and common sense has no place. And by “common sense”, I don’t have Sarah Palin’s version of “common sense” in mind. Sarah Palin’s inflammatory rhetoric has millions of simple-minded women and men all hopped up and ready to do a “revolution”. If they could only see Palin for what she is, a flamboyant narcissist with a self-serving agenda that reminds one of the political enviornment of 1930s Germany that saw the rise of Hitler. She’s leading the charge against the “elites” (analogous to Hitler's Jews), along with her simple-minded “Mama Grizzly” followers who don’t understand that they’re being manipulated into a self-defeating agenda by the real elites, the billionaires and business tycoons hiding behind the scenes pulling the strings. You have retirees railing against the deficit and backing candidates who will deprive them of their Social Security or unemployment insurance which the working people will need when their job is the next to go. Why can’t they see this? Why can’t they see how America is being destroyed from within by parasitic interests striving only to further enrich themselves at the people's expense? There is no sense of patriotism by these huge businesses, insurance conglomerates, and financial titans. They know exactly what they’re doing. They’re being driven by greed, pure and simple. “Greed is Good!” is their mantra. To them, power and control is everything there is. It's the only thing there is. Screw the little people. These interests and their Republican (and sometimes Democratic) stooges in Congress have it all planned out. And thanks to the Republican Supreme Court they’ve taken us down the slippery slope past the point of no return. They keep the people off balance by promising copious job production by cutting taxes for rich “job creators”, knowing all the while that mass job creation just isn’t gonna happen. It’s like a boulder rolling down a mountain, it may be impossible to stop.

So that’s where we are. The sane versus the insane. The thinking people versus the stupid sheeple. The rich versus the poor (and what’s left of the middle class). And, most ominously, the common people versus the Big Business-China co-op. Polarized People and their favorite Polarized Politicians all spewing hate and ill-will. Senator Jim DeMint, Michele Bachmann and Sarah Palin versus you and me. A house divided, a kingdom divided. What the hell is this world coming to? Armageddon?