Will GOP Voters Ever Wake Up to How Much GOP Lawmakers Screw Them Over? Thom Hartmann
- Will GOP Voters Ever Wake Up to How Much GOP Lawmakers Screw Them Over? - From stagnant wages to soaring costs for rent, medical, & prescription drugs—the so-called "conservative" voter never seems to figure out what's going on. Opinion, By Thom Hartmann, Common Dreams, Jan. 03, 2023. - Ed. 📚
When will Republican voters figure out how badly they’re getting screwed by Republican politicians?
— Desperate workers struggle with soaring rents (courtesy of Republican-donor hedge funds);
— lack of healthcare (12 GOP-controlled states still refuse to expand Medicaid for under-$15,000/year workers) is literally killing Americans;
— wages have flatlined since Reagan declared war on workers in 1981 while the merely rich have become the morbidly rich;
— Americans pay 10 times as much as Canadians for some drugs because Republicans block any effort to bring competition to that marketplace;
— at the same time Trump & his GOP buddies in the House and Senate borrowed $1.7 trillion to fund a tax giveaway to his billionaire buddies, student debt passed the $1.7 trillion mark…
Yet somehow the “conservative” base voters never seem to figure it out. Why? 💡
Most Republican voters don’t think much about it, but there are 2 very distinct layers to the GOP. It’s like a pyramid with a capstone at the very top. The vast base of the pyramid are the white voters who Richard Nixon invited into the party after the Democrats embraced racial equality in 1964/1965 with the Civil Rights Act & the Voting Rights Act. They mostly live in all-white neighborhoods, attend all-white churches, & send their kids to all-white schools. While most aren’t the Confederate-flag-toting “out and open” racists like the folks who showed up at the Capitol on January 6th, they’re nonetheless “uncomfortable” with nonwhite people. It’s their “culture,” they’ll tell you.
At the tippy-top of the pyramid, it’s capstone, are the handful of white billionaires who answered Lewis Powell’s 1971 call to get active & seize control of America’s political institutions. They’ve funded think tanks in every state & at the federal level, sponsor anti-labor economics & political science professors in our colleges & universities, lever judges into positions all the way up to the Supreme Court, & pour a seemingly unending river of cash into GOP candidates for office. These elite of the GOP live insular lives in their mansions with servants’ quarters & private security, travel on private jets, & vacation on private islands or their own personal super-yachts. They don’t really care that much about race because it’s not an issue in their daily lives: the people who enter the circle around them & their families are tightly regulated.
These conservative elite often own or are descended from the owners of America’s largest and most profitable businesses.
Their issues, therefore, are their own income taxes and the regulation of their companies’ behavior.
- They understand that Voltaire was dead serious when he said, “The comfort of the rich depends on an abundant supply of the poor.”
To keep their taxes low they fund movements to privatize public schools, gut “entitlements,” & oppose any sort of “welfare” aid to working class or poor people. To keep their businesses “free of government interference” they pay off politicians & hire judges to destroy unions, kneecap regulations, & spiff “conservative” media celebrities who lionized them as “job creators” & “geniuses.” You’d think the white base of the GOP would have figured out by now that the Republican elite are more interested in keeping their wages down than having them as neighbors, but the “Makers” of the party have executed a brilliant strategy to keep their own taxes low & profits high while suppressing the “Takers’” wages & benefits among the party’s base.
Truth be told, many in the GOP base were beginning to figure this out by the end of the disastrous presidency of trust-fund-baby George W. Bush. He’d begun the privatization of Medicare with his Medicare Advantage scam in 2003; lied us into 2 unnecessary and illegal wars; borrowed around $4Trillion to fund a massive tax cut for his donors, family, & friends... - Read More, https://www.commondreams.org/opinion/will-gop-voters-ever-wake-up
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