Rising wages and politics outside of Cleveland!

Amid the Cleveland Carnival -- with six (count-em) speakers named Trump, and Duck Dynasty stars replacing AWOL former presidents and statesmen, onstage -- I think it best to take some steps back from Ohio and give this week's political posting a wider perspective. I'll offer a final riff on Donald Trump at the end of this essay. But first --

Wages are rising... almost the last piece in the longest economic recovery since the 1950s.  The U.S. economy gets a bad rap these days, despite the fact that it’s doing better than almost every other economy that went through a financial crisis in 2007-2008. With very low unemployment and historically low inflation.

Also  the pace of health-care cost growth has also slowed. For years skyrocketing health-care costs gobbled up a larger share of workers’ total compensation, crowding out wage growth. This is exactly what the ACA promised and its detractors declared to be impossible. Do factual outcomes and predictions matter?

Add to this the fact that entrepreneurial startups, small businesses and innovation, all economic drivers, always-always-always do much better across democratic administrations.

So what is toking so much anger, down below, that even the Fox-Beck-watching confeds know something is deeply wrong? Both Sanders and Trump channel rage over rapaciously greedy insider-manipulators.  Sanders points to facts, like skyrocketing wealth inequality, propelled by Supply Side gushers fed into oligarchic maws, approaching levels not seen since 1789 France. 

On the right? Gifted svengalis know they have to point fingers at somebody rich and powerful. And so they choose...

== Blame it all on George Soros! ==

Purportedly “libertarian” newsletterist David Galland has been posting jeremiads putting the entire blame for the world’s refugee crisis - as well as the 2008 bank collapse and every other 21st Century calamity - on George Soros. 

Well, why not? The party of oligarchy can sense a rising revulsion toward aristocratic rule embedded in American DNA. So pick a symbolic scapegoat oligarch. A democrat! Soros.

Fine, but there must be a core rationalization. Something to make Soros seem equal to Roger Ailes, Rupert Murdoch, Sheldon Adelson, the Kochs, The Waltons, Wall Street and the Saudi Royal House, combined! How do you pump one man to loom as the archetype rich (and Jewish) manipulator?  Beck, Fox, Limbaugh and Hannity all parroted the same line:

"Here's a man who single-handedly toppled EIGHT FOREIGN GOVERNMENTS!" 

In fact, Soros had help topping those governments. But yes! Let there's truth to this assertion. Soros was largely involved in sending those governments that he despised crashing down.  Only... do nodding dittoheads ever... even once... lift their heads to ask Beck or Limbaugh or Hannity: "Say, Sean... WHICH foreign governments did that vile manipulator-commie George Soros topple? (Actually, the number isn't eight. It is ten.)

The human quality of curiosity is suppressed by the insane War on Science. Still... repeat after me: "Which foreign governments do almost all the right wing shouters credit George Soros with toppling?"

Now you see the Lobotomization Explanation for Donald Trump, since the long vanished days of minds like Goldwater and Buckley. Not one member of the Fox-Beck-Breitbart-Drudge Nuremberg rally lifts his head to ask inconvenient questions.

Are you ready for the list?  Let’s have a drum roll… or scroll spaces to make you work for it.

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 "Which foreign governments do the entire right wing establishment credit George Soros with toppling?"

The communist dictatorship of Hungary.
The communist dictatorship of Poland
The communist dictatorship of Czechoslovakia
The communist dictatorship of Romania
The communist dictatorship of Bulgaria
The communist dictatorship of Estonia
The communist dictatorship of Latvia
The communist dictatorship of Lithuania

Add in Ukraine, whose loss from the Russian sphere of influence drove Vladimir Putin to a frenzy. Sure, the Russian press credits a diabolically clever and Machiavellian-aggressive Barack Obama for that immense, strategic loss, which vastly overshadows the later, minor-and-expected claw-back of Russian-speaking Crimea and Donbass. But I am willing to toss some credit back in time, to Soros.

Make it explicit. Glen Beck and all those other right wing mavens officially credit terrifying leftist George Soros with the toppling of the Iron Curtain, liberating hundreds of millions and the victorious end of the Cold War. That is explicitly and exactly what they have been saying for more than twenty years, absolutely relying on their followers never to ask any details.

Huh.  I thought it was that other liberal (compared to today’s GOP) Ronald Reagan! In fact, they both share equal credit with Michail Gorbachev and with architect of the West’s overall plan of calm containment - George Marshall.  (With Jimmy Carter deserving more of an assist cred than you’d believe!)

  

Look, the crux here is not who actually tore down the wall. 

No, ask why do Fox/Beck/Limbaugh followers never poke at a tsunami of ironies, contradictions and outright lies? The answer is “cultural”… the same reason a million confederates marched to fight and die for their slaveholding plantation lords. It's the recurring American tragedy and it has no solution except for the Blue Union to just keep on winning and moving us into the future.

As you watch the farce in Cleveland, oh, pity Barry Goldwater. spinning 6000 RPM in his grave.

           

== A final look at DT ==

Among the more interesting attempts to decrypt the Donald Trump phenomenon is this well-written, informative and amusing piece contending that it’s all a way to reinvigorate the money-making Trump brand.  

Do I agree we are witnessing a scam campaign or ‘scampaign’? Naw.  Still the author does connect some dots, like the way radio svanarolas have milked elderly white audiences ever since John Bircher paranoia jockeys in the 1950s. In The New Republic, Jeet Heer writes:

“The anti-intellectualism that has been a mainstay of the conservative movement for decades also makes its members easy marks. After all, if you are taught to believe that the reigning scientific consensuses on evolution and climate change are lies, then you will lack the elementary logical skills that will set your alarm bells ringing when you hear a flim-flam artist like Trump. The Republican “war on science” is also a war on the intellectual habits needed to detect lies….” and “an entire class of Republican politicians, including Herman Cain, Newt Gingrich, Mike Huckabee, used mailing lists built up in their presidential campaigns to sell dubious products afterward.”  

Including a “breakthrough” remedy for erectile dysfunction. Yipe. At least Bush and Cheney robbed us the old-fashioned way.