Reply #24: Spot on, TFC-- both the analysis and the presentation...

[TygrBright]

...the ultra-wealthy oligarchs are only doing what every organism spends its life doing: Trying to survive and enable their offspring to thrive. That is, to retain their wealth, their control, their perceptions of themselves as "the REAL power," and pass on to their dynasties a world where their children inherit such wealth and control as a "right."

To do so, they must subvert the thinking of just enough Americans to allow them to control the mechanisms of government, and that's what they've done. They're now in Stage Two of the process, using those mechanisms of government to achieve their goal of perpetuation. It may seem counter-intuitive, but their end is not the oppression of the lower orders, per se, and that's why they get so injured-sounding and self-righteous when these effects of their actions are pointed out to them. They don't really want to HARM anyone else, they just want what they perceive as "their rights"-- the right to continued control of the economic and political capital of this nation. That's all. Just fighting for their "rights," like every American.

And that tone of injured innocence, that perfectly sincere framing of their actions as "ensuring the freedom to be rich," etc., helps them further snooker those who are not in the elite group of oligarchs, who in turn want their freedom to be rich, and who can't see that only the elite will EVER be allowed in the club. Until we decouple this presentation from the reality of what their economic and political policies do to the middle class, large sections of the middle class will continue to trot along behind them like sheep, certain they're being led to the McMansion of their dreams, the vacation home in the Caribbean, the luxury SUV, and the kids in Hahvahd.

Thanks for putting one more chip on the edifice of deception and destruction!

appreciatively,
Bright