The Republican Strategy: Divide the Country and Keep Themselves Rich

This strategy is what we see under way right now in Wisconsin -- and in the nation's House of Representatives.  It staggers my mind that those who vote Republican continue to adamantly praise and support the policies that are tearing our country apart and will harm most of us, while making the rich corporatists even richer. Some never learn.  They swallow whatever FOX News and their "dittohead" masters tell them.  These voters, like the woman in the children's story "I Know an Old Lady," have swallowed a horse. In the lady's case, "She's dead, of course."  And what do you think will happen to us?  Read the following...and find out.   http://www.readersupportednews.org/opinion2/277-75/5003-the-republican-strategy

THE REPUBLICAN STRATEGY
By Robert Reich

EXCERPTS: The Republican strategy is to split the vast middle and working class - pitting unionized workers against non-unionized, public-sector workers against non-public, older workers within sight of Medicare and Social Security against younger workers who don't believe these programs will be there for them, and the poor against the working middle class.

By splitting working America along these lines, Republicans want Americans to believe that we can no longer afford to do what we need to do as a nation. They hope to deflect attention from the increasing share of total income and wealth going to the richest 1 percent while the jobs and wages of everyone else languish.

Republicans would rather no one notice their campaign to shrink the pie even further with additional tax cuts for the rich - making the Bush tax cuts permanent, further reducing the estate tax, and allowing the wealthy to shift ever more of their income into capital gains taxed at 15 percent.

The strategy has three parts. 
The Battle Over the Federal Budget
The Assault on Public Employees
The Distortion of the Constitution

The Strategy as a Whole
These three aspects of the Republican strategy - a federal budget battle to shrink government, focused on programs the vast middle class depends on; state efforts to undermine public employees, whom the middle class depends on; and a Supreme Court dedicated to bending the Constitution to enlarge and entrench the political power of the wealthy - fit perfectly together.

They pit average working Americans against one another, distract attention from the almost unprecedented concentration of wealth and power at the top, and conceal Republican plans to further enlarge and entrench that wealth and power.

What is the Democratic strategy to counter this and reclaim America for the rest of us?  (An excellent question indeed!  Are our elected politicians--our supposed representatives--all in bed together?  Methinks so!)