By Jim Hoover

Sadly, it is true. Plutocrats are winning the war against the people. And, yes, we should call it a war. Unlike the term’s use in other contexts (war on drugs, for example), it actually is a period of armed conflict between groups: the interests of the rich versus those of the rest of us.

The period began in earnest about the time that Ronald Reagan took the presidency. His policies were a partial implementation of a unified think tank plan, part ideological, part Machiavellian, part economic, and part political.

The arms are not guns. They are weapons used to promote plutocratic interests:  ideas, education (or lack thereof), money, media, and government.

The ideas are dispersed by the media, some subtle and some not so subtle. The not so subtle is the propaganda distributed by conservative media like Fox News (sometimes called Fox Noise), which is a subsidiary of the Republican Party. Talk Radio, under the auspices of the so-called Clear Channel Communications, is also part of the effluence. Several generations of Americans are increasingly vulnerable to this toxic and divisive message, for they have been under attack by social and economic war against them: jobs going overseas, rampant unemployment, opportunity curtailed, and constant favoritism to the corporate rich.

The subtle purveyors of propaganda are now more dominant in the beltway media. Autocratic governments know that they must always control the message. Let me give some examples.

Republicans tank the economy and threaten default and the media scores both Republicans and Democrats. If a media source strays from this line, conservative sources threaten and intimidate like circling vultures, forcing living tissue that cowers to dive for cover. Moreover, the beltway media doesn’t much question the Republican onslaught against the deficit and the debt ceiling, when a stimulus is sorely needed.

Certainly logic and sanity do not control this message. Plutocrats do, through the Republican Party. It keeps those advocating jobs for the unemployed off balance, or marginalized.

Ironically, the major idea and also the biggest target involve the government. The government is an effective plutocratic tool of war against the people and for the plutocrats, and at the same time is portrayed as being the enemy of the people because government is really the only hope for equal opportunity, justice, and fairness. Like everything else, Republicans use government to weaken the opposition.

When the Republicans gain control of government they fashion it for plutocratic interests. The Citizens United ruling, which gave unlimited power to rich corporate interests to influence elections, came about through Republican appointments to the courts. The tax break for the rich was rammed through by George W. Bush in his plutocratic rampage. With a cowardly Democratic Party and president, a political climate of choking off prosperity and continuing tax breaks for the rich seems to be poisoning the political body like cancer.

A climate that starves opportunity has seen rioting and burning of buildings in countries like Great Britain. In the US it promotes angst, anger, poverty, hopelessness, and in the eyes of the rich, hopefully a malleable population, easily infected by plutocratic propaganda flowing out of their media chains.

The Plutocratic war against the people is working so well that plutocratic minions did not calculate they could bring down the whole American economic system in the process. But then again blind greed tends to forego any thought of outside interests when you seek money, power and control.

The redistribution of wealth from the people to the rich has been so effective that our nation is becoming economically impoverished, slowly for the fear-ridden middle and upper middle class, but very rapidly for the lower rungs of society.

Reducing taxes on the profits from the exploitation of massive wealth and pumping out corporate welfare, in general undermines the functional foundation of the nation. Infrastructure growth, education, training and the well-being of the workers is quickly degraded.

This in turn diminishes America’s ability to compete in global markets, what with a service economy, whose manufacturing base has been stripped to less than 9%.

One wonders if the increasingly global corporations that plutocrats represent really care about this trend.

Discernibly, Republicans and too many Democrats don’t.