For the next month -- maybe two or three months -- the American Right will distract citizens with a concerted effort to demonstrate the wisdom -- quite likely "The Christian Wisdom" -- of enacting "Hold Your Ground" laws in every state that lacks one.
Conservatives see such advocacy as "the high road to civilization."
Liberals see such advocacy as ideological diversionism, a derivative tactic of "Divide and Conquer" that distracts uninformed people from core political issues.
Here's how it works...
You cannot "follow the money" if your head is enveloped by gunsmoke or immersed in the darkness of other people's bedrooms and uteruses.
Ultimately, the nation's core issues are not about violence and they are not about sex.
In fact, violent crime is at an all time low - http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/witness/201112/good-tidings-violence-all-time-low
And if we take into account an upward blip caused by the recession, abortion has declined so steeply in recent decades that the trend-line seems headed for a lower abortion rate than before Roe v. Wade. http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2098484/Teen-pregnancy-abortion-rates-U-S-plummet-40-YEAR-low.html /// http://www.guttmacher.org/pubs/journals/25s3099.html)
If people are forthright about the central role played by their pocketbooks, it becomes clear that America's bedrock issues are not about violence and sex but about money and the plutocratic degradation of democratic process.
Income Inequality Is At An All-Time High
University of California at Berkeley
Many Americans applaud the egregious discrepancy revealed by the above graph: One one hundredth of one percent of Americans take home 6% of the nation's income. (Six percent translates to 31,0000 people.)
Distracted by social issues, "red button Americans" believe that unlimited concentration of wealth in The Capitalist Class creates more jobs and trickle-down prosperity.
These citizens ignore the central importance of "threshhold phenomena" and how catastrophe manifests above -- and below -- certain limits.
Consider human life where the ambient temperature is above 200 Fahrenheit or lower than minus 200.
The impossibility of sustaining life outside such narrow "envelopes" is demonstrably absurd but universally subscribed - at least "on the right."
Distracted by social issues, "red button Americans" believe that unlimited concentration of wealth in The Capitalist Class creates more jobs and trickle-down prosperity.
These citizens ignore the central importance of "threshhold phenomena" and how catastrophe manifests above -- and below -- certain limits.
Consider human life where the ambient temperature is above 200 Fahrenheit or lower than minus 200.
The impossibility of sustaining life outside such narrow "envelopes" is demonstrably absurd but universally subscribed - at least "on the right."
Naive belief in the beneficial effects of ever higher wealth concentration does not take into account 1.) that unprecedented tax cuts during the Bush administration did NOT result in cumulative job growth nor distributed prosperity, 2.) that current levels of income discrepancy prevent middle class consumers from propelling economic growth - http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/03/opinion/03reich.html?_r=1 - and 3.) that Wall Street financiers (when not profiteering by "churning markets") steer American treasure overseas where profit margins are greater than in the United States. Notably, most jobs lost in The Great Recession are not coming back. http://www.investopedia.com/terms/c/churning.asp#axzz1rqBvVbf7 /// http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/14/opinion/why-i-am-leaving-goldman-sachs.html?pagewanted=1&_r=1
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