America the Socialist - you WISH

Fivethirtyeight.com has a nice explanation of the electoral shift in 2008 that appears in the map at the left. Well and good for Dims to win elections. But it misses the big picture.

The big picture is that whites took a look at a Republican candidate who offered tax cuts skewed toward the wealthy investors that had just tanked their middle-class pensions, and who will double their government's deficit, and who are forcing cuts in every public support for middle-class life known to man, and took a look at this candidate who defined the 30-year boom in income inequality and 30-year wage freeze for 80% of Americans as the fountain of wealth, and who trashed tax cuts NOT skewed toward the rich as socialism - and 55% of the dimwits voted for him!

We have to face the fact that when it comes to their own money, white Americans are the dumbest fuckers on earth.

Reality check. Guess who made the middle class. Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Pushed by the labor movement, by Democrats, and by socialists. And by communists! And then by the New Deal's mass public works program that was finally and sadly given its proper enormous scale by World War II, and still later by retaining and expanding it via the Republican Gov Earl Warren in California and even a little by Dwight D. Eisenhower in the Republican 1950s White House, even as McCain and Palin's ideological godfathers were defining socialism as anti-Americanism, and by being expanded yet again by Dem Gov of California Pat Brown and Republican Gov of New York Nelson Rockefeller - before that kind of Republican was drummed out of the party and turned into a Clinton Democrat.

Here's a short, starter list of the socialist government programs that created the middle-class out of the abandoned farmers and union-busted workers and semi-educated fake professional service workers like the folks who bred me.

• Federal Home Loan Bank Act (1932): creates savings and loans to fund mortgages with federal guarantees in case of default
• Home Owners’ Loan Act (1933): cheap credit
  
• Glas-Steagall Banking Act (1933): established Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation and kept banks from blowing all of your money like they did after its repeal in the late Clinton period.
  
• Various New Deal Legislation (1930s): support for farms, small business, home building, credit stability, rural electrification
• Servicemen’ Readjustment Act (1944) (“GI Bill of Rights” - supports education, job training, medical care consumer loans, home loans for vets
• Highway Authorization Acts (1947, 1956): 79,000 miles constructed
  
• Federal Housing Administration: direct loans (4%) and loan guarantees for large-scale housing development

Each of these programs had to be pried open over many years for African Americans and other people of color. But this long civil rights struggle doesn't change the fact that the middle-class, segregated then more integrated, exists only because of mass social investment, now and forever, amen.

Meanwhile, yesterday, mass social investment was indeed taking place, for the t0p 0.01%, and NOT happening for everyone else:

• AIG upped its take of your money to $150 billion. For just one gambling insurance company, that's what it costs for us to cover its lost bets.
• Fannie Mae announced another $29 billion in losses for the 3rd quarter of 2008.
• American Express declared itself a bank so it could feed at the same federal windows.
• Arnold Schwarzenegger, put into office by the white middle-class, and saying every week for years that the state of California spends too much, suddenly declared that the real problem is the state doesn't tax enough. His solution: increase the sales tax, soaking the middle and the poor.
• GM has decided to save its dwindling cash reserves by stopping retiree health benefits for its former white-collar workers.
• The New York Times published data suggesting that 10 million homeowners will soon have their houses "underwater" - worth less than the mortgage they are paying to stay in the house.
• The University of California announced that its pension fund had lost 28.3% of its value since June 30, 2007 - echoing similar losses all over the country.
• The Los Angeles Times reported that the federal bank bailout could cost the state of California $2 billion in lost tax revenues.
  

Meanwhile the war in Iraq, that great murderer of Iraqis and fleecer of the American public, got going again.

Smile as you write those checks, and give thanks to Baal that we have no socialism in America!