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I was an undying optimist right up until Bush the 1st and Clinton/Gore signed NAFTA/GATT, and then I began to s-l-o-w-l-y become a pessimist, as I realized Clinton was a DINO, not the progressive everyone believed him to be. It took quite a while for me to understand that the Clinton administration's move to the center, and toward a more corporate-friendly reality was happening behind all of the fog of America's political apathy of that time.
I, like many others, didn't see the religious right's sudden move into the fray of American politics, which started with Bush the 1st's administration, nor did we see the influence of, and the manipulations by, the Neo-Cons, which Bush the 1st had rejected as the "nut-jobs in the basement."
But both groups, the dismissed fringe-fundamentalist Evangelicals, and the long ignored Straussian Neo-Con Pax-Americana Empire "nut-jobs in the basement" found each other, through the opportunistic corporatist's funding, manipulation, and applied misinformation and propaganda of, and through, the conservative think-tanks, and their buying off of political sycophants, and financially corrupted corporate scientists. It wasn't a conspiracy, as much as it was a mutual, and purposeful, opportunistic coming together of financial and ideological power.
And the rest, as they say, is history. . . international free-trade polices, globalized free-market forces, privatization of national resources, expanding global corporate political power over the laws of governmental structures in all nations, the resultant rise of political chaos and terrorism, the consolidation of corporate power and influence within the United States, consolidation of informational media into the hands of a few corporations, the rise of misinformation and propaganda on a global scale, destruction of environmental treaties, laws, and regulations, destruction of social safety-net programs, and increasing resource wars. . .
Almost all of it controlled from within the corporatized fundamentalistic and ideological American governmental structures created by the opportunistic coming together of the three groups - The greed of the corporatists, the religious fervor of the fundamentalists, and the power hungry ideology of the Neo-Cons - And all was "fine" with all three, as long each was getting what it wanted, and the separate protests and dissents of the masses remained suppressed. . .
The level of their successes has been staggering and mind-blowing, and I, like many other reality-based Americans were stunned by the lack of response by the American people, to the point that I lost my optimism, became even cynical. So much of the bad/wrong was so obvious, so in-your-face, so openly arrogant, and so successful. . . Three straight corrupted national elections, the emptying of the federal treasury, the shift of wealth into the hands of the few, the destruction of the manufacturing base and middle-class, the consolidation of the media, the corporate/fundamentalist/neo-con take-over and loading of all of the American regulatory agencies with industry lobbyists and ex-CEOs, the destruction of the Separation of the Church and the State, the politicization of Faith-Based initiatives, the corporately controlled privatization of many nation's natural resources, "free-speech zones," the marginalization and demonizing of dissent and protests. etc., etc., etc. . .
There seemed to be no hope of stopping it, even in the face of lost jobs, even in the face of the exposed lies, even in the face of the mounting deaths, even in the face increasing global warming realities, even in the face of increasing attacks on the rationality of science, even in the face of obvious and openly sneering arrogance. . . But then came the smack-you-in-the-face realizations from Katrina, Rita, record temperatures, record rains, floods, mud slides, wildfires, high gas prices, exposed cronyism, exposed incompetence, exposed bigotry, exposed treason, exposed criminality, exposed vulnerability, exposed reality. . .
Then the fundamentalists sensed that they were not "getting what they wanted" - a stacked supreme court, and they reacted. They have turned on "their own" in a big way. And one grieving mother exposed the "noble cause" for the "noble lie" that it is. And one honest prosecutor is exposing the "leaders" for the treasonist criminals that they are. . .
And it turns out that maybe there is hope after all, even though much of the environmental damage is irreversible now, there is hope. . . Our nation's Deist Founders may have done a better job of constructing the protections of our Constitutional Democracy than they, or I, knew. . .
I am becoming ,cautiously, optimistic once again.
