Take an extreme progressive activist and gadfly like Michael Moore. He considers those on the right and opponents like the Bush Administration enemies, and uses extreme rhetoric and ugly innuendo against them. But in his deeds and words, he attacks them with cameras and microphones, not guns. And he tells those who would be supporters or followers to do the same, as he did in the 2004 election when he urged people to go to the polls with cameras and notebooks to defend the right to a fair election, and not to go to the polls with guns and weapons. It really is one thing to go after those you disagree with an intent to embarrass them, and quite another to go after them with the intent to eliminate them.

And let’s face it, the incidence of tree hugging, granola eating progressives owning guns is a fraction of the Red State, red meat, conservative, Tea Party demographic which at its core is heavily populated with gun toting, gun loving, NRA worshipping people. Fine, that’s their right, but when those in positions of real or percieved authority, be they elected officials like Bachmann or messianic TV and radio personalities like Beck and O’Reilly actually instruct an audience armed with more firepower than the armies of some countries to take up arms against their government or those they disagree with, or carry guns to intimidate or threaten their enemies, or to actually take violent action like eliminating political opponents or using second amendment remedies to influence congressional legislation, then what can we expect to happen?

And here’s the bottom line…violent death and injury has really only occurred from the right side of the political spectrum, and is likely to increase according to an April 2009 Dept. of Homeland Security Report.

The first battle line of the new dynamic in Washington appears to be over the Bush tax cuts that are scheduled to expire at the end of this year, primarily those that will impact the the richest 1% to 2% of all Americans. And, if we’re to believe what the Republican leadership is saying already, it appears that instead of focusing on spending and deficit reduction, which is what all the hysterical screaming seemed to be about from the Tea Party, the focus for the newly minted Republicans and their seasoned colleagues in Washington will be insuring that the wealthiest among us do not suffer a diminishment in their already robust bank accounts due to higher taxes.

Now, to understand where we are when it comes to the distribution of wealth in the U.S., it is helpful to look at what the top 1% or 2% of the wealthiest Americans, those that are the focus of the fight over extending the tax cuts, represent in terms of the total wealth in this country, and how that compares to other segments of our society.

In a recent article in the NY Times by Nicholas Kristof, he points out that “the richest 1 percent of Americans now take home almost 24 percent of income, up from almost 9 percent in 1976.” He also notes that “C.E.O.’s of the largest American companies earned an average of 42 times as much as the average worker in 1980, but 531 times as much in 2001,” and that “from 1980 to 2005, more than four-fifths of the total increase in American incomes went to the richest 1 percent”.So I guess it would be fair to say that as opposed to things getting worse for the wealthiest Americans in the recent downturn, the truth is that through both good and bad economic cycles, the rich did OK.

And why is it that the rich have prospered regardless of the economic pains suffered by the vast majority of Americans other than the top 1%? Well, that is a subject that is oft debated in the U.S. by politicians and pundits, and they all act like it is some extremely complex issue that defies an easy explanation. However, for those outside the U.S who can look at our country and our politics with an objective eye, it is anything but complicated. Just look at how Johann Hari of the British newspaper The Independent recently described the current leadeship of the Republican Party in straightforward, easy to understand, and damning terms…

John Boehner came from a poor family of twelve children, and heroically worked three jobs (including as a janitor) to put himself through business school. But when he got to elected office, it turned out that there was alot more money to be reaped from serving the interests of rich people than serving the people he came from. He took money from the insurance companies, and voted to deny healthcare coverage to sick children and to the people who hurried to the World Trade Centre on 9/11 to try to dig people from the wreckage, exposing them to deadly toxins. He took money from defense contractors, and supported every war going. He tirelessly champions the overdog, while hoovering up their cash and flying on their private jets to some of the most luxury resorts in the world.

In the campaign, Boehner said his priority was to “stand up for ordinary Americans” against “the elite”, and to “cut the deficit as a matter of urgency.” So what has been his first priority as Speaker? To fight furiously to keep the gigantic Bush tax cuts for the elite richest two percent of Americans, even though this alone will add two trillion dollars to the deficit over the next decade. It’s very revealing. He immediately dumps on his propaganda causes – ordinary Americans, and the deficit – while slavishly serving his one true cause: serving the interests of rich people like the ones who happen to pay for his campaigns and his jaunts.

So there you have it, a plain spoken and straight forward look at what is, and has been going on. No confusion over whether or not ending the tax cuts for the wealthy is really a socialist plot, will cause destruction of the free enterprise system, will guarantee the demise of small or medium or big business, and none of the other crap the Republican leadership and the Sunday talk show pundits throw around to obfuscate what is really going on and what the real truth is; namely that Republican control of the government and the economy for most of the last quarter century has allowed them to actively and intentionally redistribute the wealth of the country, all the while promoting an image of being fiscally conservative guardians of the common man.

So now, as Timothy Noah of Slate noted in an excellent series on inequality, the United States arguably has a more unequal distribution of wealth than traditional banana republics like Nicaragua, Venezuela and Guyana. And now that Republicans have regained power in at least one legislative branch, the prospects are that this inequality will only get worse, as their stated opposition to the repeal of the tax cuts for the richest 1% of Americans suggests.

One can only hope that the Americans who abandoned Obama and the Democratic Party in 2010 are going to pay attention so something can be done to reverse the disaster that will be Repulican governance over the next two years, governance that has already started based on the recent capitulation of the White House on the Bush Tax cuts as reported in the Huffington Post…

President Barack Obama’s top adviser suggested to The Huffington Post late Wednesday that the administration is ready to accept an across-the-board, temporary continuation of steep Bush-era tax cuts, including those for the wealthiest taxpayers. That appears to be the only way, said David Axelrod, that middle-class taxpayers can keep their tax cuts, given the legislative and political realities facing Obama in the aftermath of last week’s electoral defeat.

Of course, the tax relief afforded the average middle class American, around $1,132 for households with incomes between $50,000 and $75,000, is a pittance compared to the average of $17,500 in tax savings that people earning between $500,000 and $1 million get under the Bush tax cuts, or the roughly $100,000 average tax cut that households with more than $1 million in income receives.

From the right, there has been anger really since the winner of the Presidential election was announced at 11:01 pm CDT on November 4, 2008 after the polls closed in California. The core of mostly white, middle-aged Red State America took immediate umberage to having a black man in the White House and the wealthy Wall St. and corporate interests that were so well treated under the Bush Administration, also realized immediately that for them, the jig was essentially up.

Not wasting any time, a number of very smart, clever, and essentially dishonest power brokers from Rupert Murdoch to Dick Armey saw that there was an opportunity to meld these two unhappy forces into something that they could wield against the new President, coming up with the ‘Tea Party Movement’ that in effect, enlisted the disaffected core of angry white-middle America to rise up against anything that remotely impacted the Wall St. and corporate interests that had made their fortunes and gained enormous power by exploiting American consumers and workers for decades. That such a movement would seem to be counter intuitive given that it would require people to basically fight for the very things that dminished their lives and hurt them financially and emotionally was of little consequence. The forces behind the movement were smart enough to realize that Americans had really not been paying attention for the better part of the last quarter century or so and that for the vast majority, reality TV in the guise of Survivor, Big Brother, Hell’s Kitchen, American Idol, and other such nonsense had become more real to Americans then such mundane and boring matters like how their taxes were being spent, how their children were being educated, whether or not the food they ate or the cars they drove were safe, or if their sons or daughters would be sent off to fight and die in wars to benefit multi-national corporations or to satisfy a President’s oedipus complex.

As we now know, this plan has worked out perfectly. The recent midterms were their crowning achievement with the GOP, always on the lookout for expedient means to obtain and hold power, hitching their fortunes to the Tea Party movement and riding it back to relevance. With the angry right flush with victory and righteous revenge, the left distraught and wondering what happened to the momentum that seemed so strong two short years ago, and the independent middle confused to the point that they find themselves voting for people they have no faith in, the collective emotional mood of the nation has been elevated to a point that makes it virtually impossible to step back and objectively look at what has transpired and evaluate where we now stand as a country.

However, such is not the case for the rest of the world, where they can take a much more objective view and where it seems people have a greater tendency to pay attention to meaningful reality as opposed to the false reality Americans worship. As a result, non-Americans often have a better grasp on what is happening in America than Americans themselves, and such seems to be the case now.

Looking at the recent events taking place in the States, and the results of the midterm elections, Johann Hari of the British newspaper The Indpendent accurately described the current situation we now find ourselves in with the ascent of the GOP:

This is the story of the modern Republican Party. They use the cultural signifiers of the good people of Middle America to get their emotional identification, meanwhile they pillage Middle America and redistribute its wealth to the rich. Sarah Palin is the queen of this cause. She presents herself as a warrior for hockey moms and Momma Grizzlies, while spreading fictions to stop those very people supporting social programs that could save their lives: remember her claim that Obama’s healthcare plan involved setting up “death panels” to execute the old and disabled? Her true slogan is Shill, Baby, Shill..

In one paragraph, he has basically distilled into simple terms that which so many pundits and talking heads in America make out to be the complicated moral and political dilemmas facing our leaders and our citizenry. To him, it is pefectly clear what has occurred.

And in explaining how such a ridiculous and seemingly impossible political reality came to exist in America, Mr. Hari goes on to articulate the essence of the Tea Party movement that helped to get us to this point, a movement which looks insane to the rest of the world but that somehow has become not only accepted in America, but is now considered normal:

The essence of the Tea Party…can be seen most plainly in Glenn Beck. Just over a decade ago, he was a drug-taking, pro-abortion, perpetually drunk DJ on morning radio. One of his famous “pranks” was to ring up the wife of a radio-show rival a few days after she had a miscarriage and taunt her about her loss. But then he stumbled into political commentary. After 9/11, Beck began to articulate a blubbery, blubbering hysteria, calling for the shooting of Michael Moore and the poisoning of Nancy Pelosi. He announced that any government program helping ordinary Americans was a step towards “communism”, and prophesied: “The country may not survive Barack Obama? If he does fundamentally transform America, we’re done. You don’t have to worry about a 2012.” He shot up to be the second highest rated show in cable news, and assembled hundreds of thousands to a rally on the Mall. At times seems quite conscious of the manipulation: “They’re getting so tired of me saying there’s a Marxist in the White House, I gotta take it up a notch,” he reportedly said to one private audience.

Consider these facts about the high-profile Tea Party candidates, many of whom actually have a chance of winning in their respective races…

One of the candidates for the Colorado Senate seat saying on ‘Meet thePress’ that “homosexuality is a choice because people can choose their partner.”

That same candidate from Colorado also saying that he disagrees “strongly with the concept of separation of church and state.”

A Senate candidate in Alaska admitting that he intentionally lied not once, but twice, to investigators in 2008 about accessing local government computers for political purposes while a government attorney as he attempted to oust a rival

A Delaware Senate candidate opening a campaign commercial by saying “I’m not a witch”

A New York Gubernatorial candidate threatening violence against a journalist and unapologetically emailing porn

The Tea Party Senate candidate in Arizona running some of the most overtly racist ads ever seen in a political campaign (making Lee Atwater look like a Sunday School Teacher by comparison), where Latinos as a people are uniformly identified with gang-bangers and murderous thugs terrorizing lily-white and racially pure white college students

A mob of male supporters of Kentucky Senate candidate Rand Paul viciously attacking a lone woman, tackling her and holding her to the ground while an unapologetic male campaign worker stomps on her neck and head, all because she had the gall to exercise her right to free speech as provided for in the constitution.

The list of the bizarre and extreme beliefs and behaviors, all of which would have summarily disqualified a political candidate from running for office in the past, grows by the day as the election approaches and the intensity of the campaigns grows. It’s as if we’ve descended into an alternate universe in which what would have once been regarded as bizarre is now the accepted.

Of course, underpinning all of this under the guise of the so-called Tea Party Movement are extremely powerful and extremely wealthy special interests, most of them from Corporate America and Wall St., such as FreedomWorks, Americans for Prosperity, and the fabulously wealthy and stunningly immoral Koch Brothers of Koch Industries, the second largest privately held company in the United States.

Now, for the objective observer with no skin in the game, it is easy to admire the sheer magnitude of the effort that has been orchestrated and that has brought us to the current madness. The secret forces and power brokers behind the Tea Party and their candidates have embarked on a masterful strategy ever since the 2008 Presidential election when they realized that their most important benefactor, the Bush Administration, had royally screwed the pooch and now they had to face an administration that would rein in their unfettered power and out of control exploitation for profits. With so much at stake, they designed and executed a brilliant plan that started with rallying the average American to do the bidding of the rich and powerful by essentially lying about all of the hot button economic and social issues that would play to people’s fears;

And on top of manipulating the power of the angry masses with lies and deceit, the forces behind the movement doubled down to insure nothing was left to chance by getting a law passed (with the help of a Supreme Court that has one of its key members wed to the Tea Party) that allows them to funnel unlimited corporate and special interest money, with no strings attached, into the elections so that victory would be assured.

The final piece of the puzzle was to leverage Fox News and the rest of the corporate-controlled mainstream media so they would continue the desired narrative of the angry voter and glorify the dishonest Tea Party movement, something they were all too happy to do given the ratings and revenue that were generated as a result.

Of course, executing this brilliant plan has done nothing to slow down these same corporate and Wall St. powerbrokers from selling out our country to foreign interests or exploiting American consumers and workers to benefit the bottom line. Hey, after all, they have to look out for the shareholders right?

So here we are, facing the most bizarre set of candidates and circumstances ever seen in a mid-term election, and for those that have conveniently forgotten the recent past under Bush, it is presented as if it all makes perfect sense. But of course, it doesn’t make perfect sense.

In reply, the only name he’s called is Russ, which elicits these responses (really, you can’t make this up!)…

You idiots are such a joke, you have no idea what it is to be an American.

E. Gray – This only proves that you’re the biggest racist on this blog.

 I still consider your views racist.

And this classic example of Tea Party intelligence from Bruce Majors (posted under ‘Message from America…’)

“The Tea Partiers are going to eliminate most of your masters, in both parties, and take control of Congress. And then spend two years investigating and exposing your flop eared fascist.
You can felch all the excrement you want from Obama’s hole and regurgitate it. But few view you as anything more than subhuman whores anymore.”

Participating in the march will be Midge Hough, who last November was instrumental in pulling back the curtain on the then relatively new Tea Party Movement that was raising a shrill and discordant voice to the healthcare debate taking place at the time. Attending a town hall meeting held by Congressman Dan Lipinski to thank him for his early support of the healthcare legislation then in the House of Representatives, she got up to tell a tragic story of losing her 7 month pregnant daughter-in-law Jenny, and her unborn grandchild due to a lack of health insurance, which effectively blocked adequate access to the primary and critical care she needed when she contracted pneumonia. It was then that she was heckled and derided by the Tea Party Patriots, a group led by a woman named Catherina Wojtowicz. The event was written about in the local newspaper, the Southtown Star and captured on a video that went viral on YouTube – (SEE IT HERE)