Glenn Greenwald: Who Are the Undeserving 'Others'?

[marmar]

via CommonDreams:



Published on Tuesday, September 15, 2009 by Salon.com

Who Are the Undeserving 'Others'?
Who are those benefiting from expanded government actions?

by Glenn Greenwald


The New York Times' Ross Douthat argues, uncontroversially, that the tea-party protests, townhall outbursts and related appendages aren't about specific health care proposals but, instead, are motivated by a more generalized anger over what is happening in Washington:

At the same time, (the health care protests have) become the vessel for a year's worth of anxieties about bailouts, deficits and Beltway incompetence.

This August's town-hall fury wasn't just about the details of health care. Neither were the anti-Obama protests that crowded Washington over the weekend. They were about the Wall Street bailout, the G.M. takeover, the A.I.G. bonuses, and countless smaller examples of middle-income Americans' "playing by the rules," as (GOP pollster Frank) Luntz puts it, "and having someone else benefit."

Notably, Douthat never specifies the identity of this so-called "someone else" who, as a result of government behavior, is unfairly benefiting from the hard work of middle-class Americans, but he gives a clue when he compares current anger over the health care bill to the anger over the 1994 crime bill, which he argues drove Democrats out of, and Newt Gingrich into, Beltway power:

Instead, the crime bill became a lightning rod for populist outrage. The price tag made it seem fiscally irresponsible. (Back then, $30 billion was real money.) The billions it lavished on crime prevention -- like the infamous funding of "midnight basketball" -- looked liked ineffective welfare spending. The gun-control provisions felt like liberalism-as-usual.

"Every day that the Republicans delayed the bill," Luntz remembers, "the public learned more about it -- and the more they learned, the angrier they got."

In other words, the 1994 fury over the crime bill was driven by the belief that the Clinton-led federal government would steal money from middle-class Americans and give it to "midnight basketball" programs, i.e., "welfare" recipients. The racial and class-war components of that fear-mongering campaign were manifest: Bill Clinton wanted to steal the money of "'middle-income Americans playing by the rules" and transfer it to the inner-city (see Ta-Nehisi Coates' examination of the racial, class and similar cultural appeals that fueled vitriolic right-wing attacks on Clinton). ............(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.commondreams.org/view/2009/09/15-6

[surrealAmerican]

1. They will never understand ...

... that poor people "play by the rules" just as much as they do. They need to feel like, if people have problems, it must be because those are "bad" people who deserve to be punished.