McCain, Palin: Demonizing the Poor
Bill Ayers is a Terrorist.
ACORN is a terrorist.
Barack Obama is a...
WHO IS BARACK OBAMA?
John McCain's new "Who is Barack Obama" ad pushes the boundaries of American gutter politics to new lows, even beyond the infamous "swiftboating" of John Kerry four years ago.
The ad focuses on Obama's connections with ACORN in Chicago. The worried narrator tells us:
What did ACORN Chicago engage in? Bullying banks. Intimidation tactics. Disruption of business. ACORN forced banks to issue risky home loans. The same types of loans that caused the financial crisis we are in today.
This is so absurd it almost defies belief, but this is the garbage that McCain is shoveling, so let's see if we can take out some trash. ACORN is a national community organizing group that works with the very poor, and has been doing so since 1970. Organizing really poor people is difficult work, notoriously hard to sustain. ACORN is almost alone in staying at it. ACORN certainly has its critics, as does any organization that has been politically active for 38 years. But its track record is also impressive in many ways. ACORN is one of the very very few political resources the truly poor in America have.
Notice, for example, that Obama himself rarely talks about the poor. He talks about the middle class. Incessantly. After each debate the Obama campaign released a video noting that McCain had failed to address the middle class. Did either candidate even say the word "poor"? There were only two candidates in this election who actually talked about poor people: John Edwards and Mike Huckabee. But that is another story.
The idea that ACORN has victimized banks into making risky home loans and is therefore somehow responsible for the current financial crisis is something we might justifiably refer to as a big lie - a statement that is so extreme as to be beyond the bounds of rational discussion, and thus difficult to reply to in conventional political terms.
Who is at fault? THE POOR. Of course! They forced those nice bankers to write all those mortgages at usurious rates! Probably forced them into those golden parachutes as well. Bolsheviks all!
McCain, Obama, Palin, Biden, and virtually every other American politician have been speaking in the last weeks of how to protect Main Street from Wall Street. Now McCain would have us believe we need to protect "Wall Street from Skid Row!
Then the ad turns to allegations that ACORN engages in "massive voter fraud." And concludes by alleging that Obama is using "ACORN front groups" (note the Communist association).
Republican accusations of ACORN "voter fraud" have become standard fare in recent elections. The story behind this lie is this: ACORN hires people do to voter registration among the poor. This is in keeping with ACORN's general approach: they hire poor people to work with poor people. Those hired are paid for each registered voter. There is a temptation for the people doing the work to paid their lists with phony names to get a little extra meal money.
There is a legitimate basis for criticizing this practice, and some progressives have done so. But do keep in mind that there is overwhelming data that shows that the poor in the US vote in very low numbers. The barriers they face are many and diverse. (If you are interested in pursuing this, a good place to start is Piven and Cloward's book, "Why Americans Don't Vote").
ACORN is well aware of the potential downside of their approach, and tries to filter out phony registration forms. Often times, it has been ACORN itself who has identified the phony names and had them pulled from the voter rolls. But what happens when they miss some? The phony forms will most likely get tossed out. If they don't, there will be a phony name on the voting list that no one can vote under. No one will be able to show up at the poll and produce an ID showing that they are the phony person, living at the phony address, and vote. The only one cheated is ACORN, which ends up paying their activists for work they didn't do.
THERE IS NO "VOTER FRAUD" HERE. Certainly not "massive." Josh Marshall explains all this in detail on Talking Points Memo.
Where this leaves the realm of farce and enters the realm of actually dangerous is how this whole ACORN lie dovetails with the William Ayers lie - the idea being peddled relentlessly by Sarah Palin that Obama somehow has a secret, long and profound connection to Ayers and 1960s "terrorists." At first that was Palin's football, but in recent days McCain is playing this one too.
"Who is Barack Obama?" (McCain ad, McCain in person).
"This is not a man who sees America like you and I see America." (Sarah Palin)
"He's palling around with terrorists who would target their own country." (Sarah Palin)
etc.
While we're at it, why not demonize those who work with the poor? Remember the Republican convention? "He's a community organizer!" (Sarah Palin)
Electorally, I don't think any of this is going to work. Maybe in a more typical political environment, but the global financial collapse we are in the midst of is hardly that. No, I think Palin and McCain are just digging themselves deeper into a hole. The problem will come after November 4, when a significant sector of Americans wakes up and believe,s actually believes, that their country is being taken over by terrorists! Socialists! UnAmericans! Poor people! This, I think, is quite dangerous.
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The Republican Party is now officially UnAmerican.
For a campaign that keeps wanting to bang the "Obama is an Elitist" drum, McCain and Palin have demonstrated a total lack of understanding concerning those with lower income. They have also been far too willing to make various groups scapegoats.
Another reason why I'm voting for a UNITED States of America and I'm voting for Obama/Biden.
~MyMindThinks
The GOP is America's largest domestic terrorist organization.
It used to be "Give the poor cheap booze and cigarettes and they will be ok"...then they raised the taxes on the one comfort the poor resort to...I am just waiting for Palin to say something along the lines of "Let them eat cake"...I agree that Obama does need to address the poor, but to be honest the poor have always been the least considered..and the middle class used to bitch about the poor, but they do less of that because they are rapidly becoming poor themselves...this would be why the middle class gets more attention. It's a class system and despite popular belief it has been for ages...it is not a matter of color but a matter of middle class, rich, poor...and the poor always get the short end of the stick...education is KEY!
The poor do not have houses, they live in cars. If you look at the executives for these big corporations they are all WHITE GREEDY MEN. The poor does not dawdle in derivatives, stocks, bonds or money market funds.
Latest ad is trotting out WELFARE in big capital letters.
This is getting really sad. The Republicans aren't even trying to have a decent argument. It's "let take every smear/ slime line, image, and tactic" that has worked over the last 2 decades and re-tread it to lather up "our base."
"The base." Good grief. I used to have a LOT of respect for the opposition party. Where have all the smart, fiscal conservatives gone? I miss you guys. Please, don't let the Republican Party become an anti-intellectual, drum beating fear-based mob.
I didn't agree with your politics, but I certainly did respect and even enjoy the arguments we used to have. Take back your Party!
Great post Mr. Ostertag.
For several months we've been hearing how deadbeat borrowers, those greedy scum, bought houses they could not afford. The implication is that poor and/or middle class people have been moving into neighborhoods and circumstances beyond their means. Rarely is the fact that if their mortgages had not ballooned their monthly payments to unaffordable levels - a direct result of predatory lending practices - there would have been no crisis at all, at least not on the foreclosure side. It is the greed of the wealthy, not of the workers, that has turned our economy south.
Scapegoating the poor has been an American tradition for centuries. The notion that the poor or even the middle class (who are now teetering on poverty) could victimize the wealthy is absurd. Thank God for ACORN and all the other groups and agencies working to alleviate the effects of poverty in America.
Bob fails to mention that Cloward and Piven are Liberal Socialist and their documented strategy on how to manipulate Poor Folks to Revolt and Destroy Capitalism caused the 1975 New York City Welfare Department Bankruptcy.
It was the Cloward-Piven Strategy that bombarded Fannie , Freddie, and especially IndyMac of California with request for Sub-Prime Loans.
Sorry but Fannie and Freddie Mac don't loan directly. IndyMac was a privately owned mortgage company and not required to make loans to poor/middle class. You must be full of C.R.A.P.
Look. Whoever took out the loans is at fault. It's not limited to the "poor". More the middle to upper middle class, actually.
Indeed, it's something you usually see in Dickens or Gaskell. Rabid laissez faire made for disgusting conditions and the exploitation of the poor -- but it was their fault. Now we've got it in a corporatist system but blaming the poor remains.
It's the welfare queens again. They rose up and got all those sub-prime mortgages, tearing apart the moral fabric of the nation once again.
I don't know man, I work in IT tech support. I work with computers all day, sometimes if I don't explain something correctly its my fault.
Someone who's sold hundreds of mortgages to someone who's buying their first, I find it hard to believe the broker didn't realize the person was probably getting in over their head.
Anyway, the person loses their house. They suffer for their bad decisions, like like the banks who lose the money... oops wait, the government is bailing out the BANKS. Who's the welfare queens here?
Conservative idealogy is dead, a trainwreck, head-on collision with a train called 'Reality'.
I quite agree. Although I think many who took out these mortgages were fools and/or greedy, it is the lenders, after all, who are supposed to be PROFESSIONALS. They are the one whose job it is to understand the connect between the mortgage and the ability to pay.
Hey, if my doctor advised an unnecessary operation and I opted for it, am I the one at fault?
Most of the defaulted mortgages were REFINANCED mortgages. Upper middle to lower upper class people covering and paying their credit card bills by refinancing their homes using the supposed equity in them for extra cash.
You're clearly not a Republican from your article.
Let me translate Republican-speak/conservative-speak for you.
Poor is not a socio-economic term. It is a racial one.
The poor are not greedy, they just want a reasonably decent standard of living!
It's the greedy rich with an insatiable appetite for more, they never know when enough is enough!
"they just want a reasonably decent standard of living!" So did I... which is why I finished school, didnt deal crack, didnt join a gang, didnt go to prison and now make a good living... its called working for a living. Blame everyone but themselves for their actions which either lead them or kept them in poverity. 100000 mexicans crossed the border each year for the chance to succeed here and many do succeed by working hard and staying out of trouble. Maybe some should take a lesson from that and try becoming a productive member of society instead of being a burden to society.
What you are doing, ProudAmerican23, is equating impoverishment with the criminal element. What you fail to understand, is that poverty is not restricted to the streets. Every time you go into a department store, grocery store, restaurant, go to a bank teller, hotel clerk, go into a coffee shop or bookstore, you are being served by someone who likely makes just above minimum wage. A few decades ago, these workers might possibly have been part of the now extinct lower middle class who once did have the ability to buy a small home. What you fail to acknowledge is that the cost of goods and services went beyond many of the working class' ability to afford. Through the ease of plastic exchange, the lower income workers found themselves in a sharecropping system of bottomless debt. No one is saying you cannot elevate yourself to a more "professional" position, but the office assistants you depend on are not high income workers, yet without them you sink. Everyone wants to be a part of the society they live in, and many people are marginalized from that participation, not because they do not work, but because their service is not esteemed. Predatory lenders took advantage of low income workers by selling housing made of cheap sticks for vast profit in a culture that diminishes the labor it depends on and then blames it for getting in too deep. The message is you can dream this life until you can't anymore.
Good Article!
If there was money to be made on the poor they would be front and center. The government has relinquished its moral obligation to the private sector in the form of food banks, shelters, etc. Like everything else the tentacles of outsourcing America has spared no aspect of our society.
Each political party shares the blame on this issue…
The more I read about the actions of repubilcans the more I think that they have no soul. The greedy are too proud to admit they make mistakes and would rather destroy the earth than change. Greed and pride are sins. it seems to me that Republicans are the worst example of humanity on earth today. God wants world peace, liberals want world peace, Gee! I wonder.
What I want to know is who held out on this bailout bill, who was willing to hold the american economy hostage for WOODEN ARROWS.
CHALLENGE TO JOHN MCCAIN: Who demanded Wooden Arrows be put in the bailout bill before they would vote for it. You've said many times of pork barrel spenders, "I will make them famous.". Name the congressman or senator who did this, out this person, and you got my vote.
A big reason for this is the media. A friend of mine recently told me she was probably voting for McCain. I asked why and she shrugged. She listens to nightly news occasionally. When we sat down and I started explaining the FACTS of life, presenting both sides but filling in the details, she was astounded. I asked her if she would like a copy of Michelle and Barak from the convention that I had. She said yes thank you. A little education can go a long way to those who are willing to listen - you have to try...
Anyone could figure this out...these two hold such contempt for the poor it's unbelievable. It's apparent at the rallies when they distract everyone with abortion talk.
http://www.myspace.com/wakeupnowpeople
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