The Frog in Boiling Water Has Started Feeling The Bern.
Last edited Fri Jan 15, 2016, 11:07 PM - Edit history (1)
OK, the actual science relating to the metaphor, of a frog allowing itself to be boiled to death if the temperature of the water in the pot in which it sits is raised slowly enough, debunks it as a myth. Frogs, it turns out, are not dumb enough to sit still for that type of treatment. Establishment politics though has long operated on the premise that America's general public may be more susceptible to that practice. That belief may be bolstered by stories like this one published by the NY Times in 2009: ”The Dangers of Taking a Dip in the Hot Tub”, where it was reported:
“The annual number of emergency room visits has been steadily rising. In 2007, 6,646 people went to emergency rooms after a hot tub injury, compared with 2,549 in 1990.
About half the injuries were caused by slipping or falling, but heat overexposure was the problem in 10 percent of the accidents...
... The study did not include fatal accidents, but the Consumer Products Safety Commission reported more than 800 deaths associated with hot tubs since 1990”.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/24/health/24stat.html?_r=0
An alternate theory for our establishment’s stubborn determination to forge ahead with politics as usual, regardless of the increasing pain being felt by a majority of Americans, might instead be premised on the same observation that Thomas Paine once made in his pamphlet “Common Sense”, written at the dawn of the American Revolution
“A long habit of not thinking a thing wrong, gives it a superficial appearance of being right, and raises at first a formidable outcry in defense of custom.”
Two hundred and forty year after the penning of those words there's a chorus of those voices raised today, inveighing against the fundamental premise of Bernie Sander's 2016 presidential campaign, that our current political system works against the interests of average Americans. They shout from all points on the long recognized spectrum of “respectable” political opinion in America, which is to say from the slightly left of center to the hard core right. Opinions like those held by Bernie Sanders until now have routinely been dismissed as “fringe” and “well outside the mainstream” by long reigning “conventional wisdom”.
Conventional wisdom has also long held that the only way to keep Social Security solvent is to reduce adjustments made for inflation in payments made to beneficiaries, and to force seniors to wait longer to become eligible for benefits, while workers in their 50's and 60's get culled from management positions and are forced to compete to become door greeters at Walmart. Conventional wisdom, at least according to Congress and most leading presidential candidates, also considers an income of a quarter million a year to be middle class.
At a time when one out of six Americans, and over a fifth of children under 18, live in poverty (officially defined as an annual income of less than $18,500 for a family of three) our political class places a higher priority on shielding the earnings of those making hundreds of thousands a year from any additional “tax hit” than it does on eliminating the suffering of children in families earning below twenty grand a year.
All of the mania surrounding recent Powerball drawings pegs that Lottery as our current “go to” portal for get rich instantly fantasies, but it wasn't always America's most coveted jackpot. For a generation that distinction was held by the Publisher's Clearinghouse Sweepstakes, the folks who showed up on your doorstep with a banner and a check. Back when the Bush tax cuts were about to expire in 2012, President Obama sought to let them for all above the middle class. A hue and cry subsequently arose over how to define Middle Class income. Obama proposed that couples with incomes less than $250,000 should not be subject to higher taxes. Ultimately, after battles in Congress, that line got drawn at $450,000 for a married couple ($400,000 for an individual), below which they could keep all of their Bush tax cuts. So here's where the Publisher's Clearinghouse comes in.
Simultaneous with that high profile national debate over protecting the tax cut for middle class families, the Publisher's Clearinghouse came up with a brand new giveaway gimmick to excite and entice the masses into subscribing to their magazines. Instead of just giving away ten million dollars like they had been doing, they announced a five thousand dollars a week for life grand prize that some lucky person already held the winning number for. Five thousand dollars a week for life, that's the stuff that dream are made of for hundreds of millions of Americans. That happens to equal an income of $260,000 a year.
The Publisher's Clearinghouse is still selling magazines off of their fabulous $260,000 a year for your life (and your heir's now also) grand prize, while Hillary Clinton is making new vows to shield middle class incomes up to $250,000 a year from any increase in taxes. What's wrong with this picture? Maybe it's the people who are not in it, the ones who have no say when it comes to establishing conventional wisdom – or defining the middle class: the ones trying to get by on something closer to the median national income of $50,000 a year. The ones for whom $250,000 is a fortune.
Tens of millions of American voices have long been ignored by the gate keepers of establishment politics. They were the trees not heard falling off in some distant forest, far removed from the corridors of power. Those not listened to are seldom represented. The status quo depends upon estrangement, and long has grown accustomed to elections where most potential voters stay home instead. That's what happens when people tire of voting for the lesser evil, and winning even less than that. That's what happens when the establishment's “long habit of not thinking a thing wrong, gives it a superficial appearance of being right”. Tens of millions of Americans live in poverty while America’s 185 wealthiest clans are collectively worth $1.2 trillion. The system that enabled this is called politics as usual.
Bernie Sanders though is not politics as usual, and the response he has gotten on the campaign trail since he announced his bid for the presidency has been anything but politics as usual. If Sander's views are seen as falling outside the mainstream of American politics that's only because the stream bed is engineered and runs through concrete culverts, narrowly defined and carefully controlled by banks that direct it.
It took Bernie Sanders a slow tenacious life time of hard political work directly pitted against prevailing establishment interests to rise to the rank of Senator from the small state of Vermont, where it was possible for many of his constituents got to know and respect him personally. It took a global financial melt down in 2008 to provide Sanders with a platform dramatic enough for his message to break through nationally. It's a message that resonates easily though when people finally hear it, because they already know it in their bones. It is a call to action, and the frog is feeling the Bern.
= new reply since forum marked as read
Thanks for the thread, Tom Rinaldo. 
The frog is feeling the Bern and the DU tadpoles too. 
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This is such a great piece of work!
PEACE
LOVE
BERNIE
Good writing.
