MAKE NO MISTAKE-Without OWS-We Would've Heard A VERY Different State Of The Union Speech Last Night! [View all]

[kpete]

MAKE NO MISTAKE-Without OWS-We Would've Heard A VERY Different State Of The Union Speech Last Night!



The State of the Union and the Would-Be 1% Nominee
By Charles P. Pierce
at 10:11AM

Make no mistake: Without all the hell-raising, and all the shouting at the right buildings, and all the drum circles, we would have heard a very different State of the Union speech last night. This country doesn't like to talk about issues of class. Not in any real sense, anyway. Not in any way that seems to undercut what we believe to be the god-kissed upward mobility that is inherent to America as roadside diners and Jerry Lee Lewis. Alas, since the Masters of the Universe burned down the house a couple of years, the issue of class in all its manifestations have become impossible to ignore. Our neighbors lose their house. Our cousin loses his job. Our kids move back in because, as we may have mentioned on this blog before, Fk The Deficit. People Got No Jobs. People Got No Money. Over the past year, thanks to the hippies in the parks, and the union folks marching in places like Wisconsin and Mitch Daniels's Indiana, the country has been tied to a chair like Alex in A Clockwork Orange and conditioned to look at what happens to your country's promise when you hand it over to greedy grifters who shuffle money for a living, and to their political hirelings — like Mitch Daniels, say, about whom more anon — who enable the shuffling and then tell the people whose lives were wrecked by it that they're just going to have to suffer a little or else The Deficit Monster will come in the night and devour their grandchildren yet unborn. Or something. The president spoke far more about righting the wrongs inherent in the system that got us into this mess than he did about The Deficit. It's hard to imagine that happening a year ago.

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If all it ever was going to be was a campaign speech, it was a very good one, and, if it's an indication of what the campaign is going to be like, then, maybe, the campaign itself will turn on whether or not the country will continue to be run on the three-card monte ethics of our corporate class. He's not in the drum circle yet, but he's in the crowd watching, and his foot is beginning to tap along.

Read more: http://www.esquire.com/blogs/politics/state-of-the-union-class-6645356#ixzz1kUFrSA8O