Idiocracy-Herman Cain

The scene in Idiocracy, the Mike Judge movie, where the US president is at the podium and being booed, but then he reaches back and pulls out a huge machine gun and fires a rapid blast into the ceiling and then says to the stunned silent audience "Right, that's what I thought".

That is a metaphor for Herman Cain. He's the Get er Done candidate. I know the man from listening to him as a radio talk show host well before the present 'dillema' of his frighteningly viable candidacy for president and I can tell you, Herman Cain speaks AM and he is the first candidate of the Idiocracy party.

This party must be taken seriously, but we on the Left have a huge divide to cross to reach them. Just like in Idiocracy they have been convinced by corporate backed spokespeople that whatever makes the corporations the most profits is good and should be supported. In today's world the corporate microphone is AM RADIO-COX-WABC and the billionaire Koch brothers who Cain refers to as his 'brothers from another mother'.

The spokespeople are, Hannity, Limbaugh, Boortz, Levin, Savage, Ingram, Beck etc. Twenty hours a day, five days a week, corporate fantasy reality; Idiocracy. Herman Cain was trained in their ranks as an AM talk radio host in Atlanta where he had his own show and often filled in for Neal Boortz until as recently as a year ago.

This is the easy answer party and easy answers appeal to a nation who still feel lost and on the ropes financially, too tired from working harder than ever to make ends meet to take the time to analyze the history and complexities of our weak economy. And tragically, many of these people are too exhausted and frustrated to take the time to even notice that the bill of goods in the Idiocracy party platform is just the same old conservative economics we've suffered through for thirty years. Even Democrat president Clinton was, in the words of Alan Greenspan 'a great Republican president, economically' because he signed Republican sponsored legislation to gut welfare and unbridled free trade which perhaps no other Democrat president in history would have signed.

This is a frightening moment for America. We are on the cusp of nominating a complete charlatan to run for the presidency in one of our major parties. It's easy to say 'it doesn't matter, he can't win the general election' and hopefully that's true, but this could get scarier before it's over. In a nation which is already all too much like Idiocracy, where people seem to no longer have any historical compass to guide them, what might happen?

The Idiocracy party has already succeeded in re-starting the conversation about taxation, from scratch, on their AM machine. 'Why have any taxes at all?' that's a good place to start, they say. And 'Why should any person, no matter how poor, not pay the exact same tax as a billionaire?' sounds good huh? What if some high profile rich young athletes like the ring of their taxation being cut to 1/4 what it presently is and they step forward as Heroes for Herman in an ad campaign? It's queasy to contemplate.

We must reach out with with basic facts about our nations fiscal history. That is our best argument. These folks, who are good people at heart, have been presented with a fake version of US history, especially concerning financial matters. The truth is that one can easily trace America's economic glory days, from 1940-80, to far higher taxes on the most wealthy with that federal revenue being spent to modernize our nations transportation and technological infrastructure, public education etc. And the reverse taxation policies we've endured since 1980 have shown us opposite results. But AM Idiocracy says 'No, we are just failing because we didn't lower the taxes on the rich enough'.

We on the Left have our work cut out for us...

I present a basic version of our recent fiscal history in my masthead under the title...at the top of the page here. Let me repeat it and please write your own version and plague the media with it! It's our only hope.

-From 1940-80 the wealthiest Americans paid between 70% and 90% in income taxes and that's how we built...the American Dream. Between 1940-80 we fought and paid for WWII, Korean War, Vietnam War, we built our US Interstate Expressway system, Roads, Electrical Grid, Telephone, our main Bridges and Tunnels; we Made every Car we Drove and we wore just the Clothes we Sewed and WE WENT TO THE MOON SIX TIMES-AND WE PAID FOR IT ALL!-