Bush's Audience

Bush speaks like he is talking to a fourth grade class. He enunciates clearly and interjects long pauses so slow people can grasp the concept. He carefully explains things in black and white models that even children could understand. Who is he talking to anyway? He is talking to his base - the religious right. In 2001 George Bush said, “You can fool some of the people all the time, and those are the ones you want to concentrate on.”

Strict interpretation of the Bible attracts the gullible. They are the people who can believe the impossible no matter how much contrary evidence is presented. They not only believe past impossible events (i.e. parting the Red Sea or Noah’s Ark) they believe in future impossible events (i.e. rapture).

The status quo of the wealthy can be maintained if these gullible, simpleminded folks promote the corporation's agenda of privatization, deregulation, and non-interference. Believing they are stopping the licentious liberals, these goofy people do the dirty work of the greedy. The rich hate the environmentalists because they interfere with production and these religious types expound on how global warming is a fraud dreamed up by liberals and alarmists while the second coming is a fact. Privatization means access to public funds so these Bible thumpers repeat that education of the masses is a disaster left to the government but would become wonderful if left to religious groups and of course private corporations, except in bad neighborhoods (which is left to government). The less dangerous aspects of military life have already been handed to private corporations as they look at every foothold to absorb tax money for the easy tasks while the distasteful ones like actual fighting are left to the government.

Who are these rich puppet masters? According to Federal Reserve numbers in 1979 20% of the wealth was in the hands of the top 1%. Thanks to the feats of the Dow, the country's richest 1 percent found themselves happily holding an estimated 40.1 percent of the country's wealth in 1997, up from 35.7 percent in 1989 and the country's next richest 9 percent were the proud owners of 33.3 percent of the nation's wealth. According to Business Week magazine, CEO compensation during the decade went from 85 times more than what average blue-collar employees received in 1990 to some four hundred and seventy-five times what blue collar workers received in 1999. Stock markets, now enthroned as the judge of all economic value, massively rewarded those companies and those CEOs most ruthlessly committed to laying off great swathes of their workforce. Some chief executives did far better: In 1997, Jack Welch, the much-revered CEO of General Electric, was paid some 1,400 times the average wage earned by his blue-collar workers in the US--and 9,571 times the average wage earned by Mexican industrial workers, who made up an increasing percentage of the GE workforce as production was moved to the region just across the border. The Republicans and the Democrats are both in bed with these fat cats. “You can fool half of the people all of the time and that's enough to make a good living.” W. C. Fields