For almost 40 years Republicans have pursued a divide-and-conquer strategy intended to convince working-class whites that the poor were their enemies.The big news is it's starting to backfire.Republicans told the working class that its hard-earned tax dollars were being siphoned off to pay for "welfare queens" (as Ronald Reagan decorously dubbed a black single woman on welfare) and other nefarious loafers.The poor were "them" -- lazy, dependent on government handouts, and overwhelmingly black -- in sharp contrast to "us," who were working ever harder, proudly independent (even sending wives and mothers to work, in order to prop up family incomes dragged down by shrinking male paychecks), and white.It was a cunning strategy designed to split the broad Democratic coalition that had supported the New Deal and Great Society, by using the cleavers of racial prejudice and economic anxiety. It also conveniently fueled resentment of government taxes and spending.The strategy also served to distract attention from the real cause of the working class's shrinking paychecks -- corporations that were busily busting unions, outsourcing abroad, and replacing jobs with automated equipment and, subsequently, computers and robotics.But the divide-and-conquer strategy is no longer convincing because the dividing line between poor and middle class has all but disappeared. "They" are fast becoming "us."
too many of us have been in the dark for too many years i don't know if awareness earlier would have put us much further than we are now, their rule was perceived by most as written in stone now that their ranks are more diverse it helps but only on the Progressive side on the other side those tokens are carrying the water for those that oppose freedom for anyone but them, that doesn't stop them from touting their concern for our freedoms which is being subject to their laws that is all we are free to do in republican world all power is to them isn't that totalitarianism?
Poverty is now a condition that almost anyone can fall into. In the first two years of this recovery, according to new report from Census Bureau, about one in three Americans dropped into poverty for at least two to six months.Three decades of flattening wages and declining economic security have taken a broader toll. Nearly 55 percent of Americans between the ages of 25 and 60 have experienced at least a year in poverty or near poverty (below 150 percent of the poverty line). Half of all American children have at some point during their childhoods relied on food stamps.Fifty years ago, when Lyndon Johnson declared a "war on poverty," most of the nation's chronically poor had little or no connection to the labor force, while most working-class Americans had full-time jobs.This distinction has broken down as well. Now a significant percentage of the poor are working but not earning enough to get themselves and their families out of poverty. And a growing portion of the middle class finds themselves in the same place -- often in part-time or temporary positions, or in contract work.
this does not just happen certain things have to happen in order for it to thrive, and the republicans have cultivated those things that were written in stone but are now turning to gravel. advantage is taken and those who suffer under that advantage will lose sight of what equality mean, no matter how many pledge of allegiance you say there is no for all never has been, unless you interpret it to mean all of your type.
this sense of class will always be as long as one can say "{haves and have not's"
