Power of Reason

The Feast of Pure Reason (193?)
Jack Levine
It's taken decades and staggering amounts of money; the killing of newspapers and TV journalism as the right-wing gained its lock on mass media.

It all adds up to the average person either tuning in to propaganda, or just tuning out.

Except that they aren't really tuned out. After decades of the best, most pervasive propaganda money can buy, the messages—"taxes: bad"; "rich people create jobs"—come through loud and clear.

From Matt Taibbi's new book is this excerpt: "America on Sale." Taibbi writes on the scam of states and municipalities plugging current budget holes by selling off remaining infrastructure: to Middle Eastern sovereign wealth funds unaccountable to U.S. scrutiny. And on this setting up

...yet another diabolic cycle for ordinary Americans, engineered by the grifter class. A Pennsylvanian like Robert Lukens sees his business decline thanks to soaring oil prices that have been jacked up by a handful of banks that paid off a few politicians to hand them the right to manipulate the market. Lukens has no say in this; he pays what he has to pay. Some of that money of his goes into the pockets of the banks that disenfranchise him politically, and the rest of it goes increasingly into the pockets of Middle Eastern oil companies. And since he's making less money now, Lukens is paying less in taxes to the state of Pennsylvania, leaving the state in a budget shortfall. Next thing you know, Governor Ed Rendell is traveling to the Middle East, trying to sell the Pennsylvania Turnpike to the same oil states who've been pocketing Bob Lukens's gas dollars. It's an almost frictionless machine for stripping wealth out of the heart of the country, one that perfectly encapsulates where we are as a nation.

We used to have a population with a sense of voting its self-interest. True, some would have found such work by Jack Levine overly Red—

The Feast of Pure Reason caught a capitalist, a policeman, and a politician in convivial discussion. The painting was done under the auspices of the WPA, which donated it to the Museum of Modern Art. But the trustees of the museum debated at length before allowing the painting to be exhibited, fearful of offending the capitalists who had endowed the museum.
–Marcia Corbino, American Artist, 1985.

But at the time it was painted, it reflected common knowledge about there being sides, as well as about who was on which one.

The creation of a large middle-class was a hard-won achievement. Its death is being marked in individual and family pain, not mass action. And Real Americans™ recoil in horror from action other than blaming the wrong targets, as instructed by Professor Glenn Beck.

Lee Fang lays it all out:

MEMO: Health Insurance, Banking, Oil Industries Met With Koch, Chamber, Glenn Beck To Plot 2010 Election

At long last, we have this suggestion for new, improved wingnut labeling—

"If you don't like being called teabaggers..."