The geniuses of the Republican National Convention have installed a huge banner across the front of the Tampa Convention Center proclaiming "We Built That".
They unconsciously summarized the Obama speech that they are trying to mis-characterize. Even though the convention center sports a corporate sponsor's name, it really was built by government with union labor. The "branding" of public buildings with corporate names is really a subtle propaganda ploy to make people think that everything good is provided to them by their benevolent corporate overlords. Americans have been conditioned to believe things that come from corporations are free, and that government is expensive. This is the opposite of reality of course.
The Middle Class shrank over the past decade for the first time since the last Republican Great Depression. There are now far fewer in this demographic and they've had a significant drop in income. This doesn't even take into account the massive price increases forced onto the middle class to pay for things they used to take for granted. Healthcare, college, sales taxes, local property taxes and government fees have been piled on to the middle class make up for not taxing the rich or the corporations that they own.
These shifts also brought along expensive inefficiencies that are inherit to operating things this way. As well as a big slice that is skimmed off the top for "privatization" that is a far bigger burden than is apparent at first blush. All designed not just to make more money for the rich, but to take it away from the middle class. If you can't carry off the loot, burn it. These are concepts were put forward in the economic "modernization" papers produced by the right wing think tanks of the 1950s. They've been applied with a meat axe in third world countries under auspices of the IMF and World Bank.
The approach has been more subtle here as the middle class has been known to rebel. They're going all in this time, the choice is stark. Sitting out the election because the Democrats aren't "left" enough to satisfy self-appointed liberal gate keepers is not acceptable. It literally is now or never, but don't kid yourself that that the struggle is over because we win a single election. It's is going to take hard work to re-educate and de-program the majority of Americans, but it can be done. Reality is out there for the grasping.
