These Low Information Voters Will Be Our Undoing

The results of the recall election of Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker tell you most of what you need to know about the state of politics in the U.S.


On the one hand, you have a governor who did not hide his desire to divide and conquer the unions, eliminate collective bargaining, decimate government services and serve a small cadre of wealthy, powerful and shady corporate interests. He was bought by the Karl Rove, the Koch Brothers, and other criminal organizations. There’s even a possible federal indictment for him on the horizon, in connection with an embezzlement investigation that has already ensnared six of his associates and aides.

So, what’s going on here? No one can question the corrupting influence of money in politics, particularly since the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision. Money is a big factor in elections, and when a few billionaires can decide which jerk to put in office, their money trumps the votes and drowns out the voices of the common folk. But still, the 1 percenters require voters to get their candidate in office and seal the deal. These people, known as “low information” voters - a charitable and technical sounding term for uneducated, ignorant or gullible - are the real problem.Yet, despite all this, Walker survived the recall, and it wasn’t even close. Plus, he did it with the support of 38 percent of union households - you know, the people Walker wants to crush. Various explanations have been given for the election results, including the notion that the people simply didn’t like the idea of a recall, or that the Super PACs flooded Wisconsin with money for their boy Walker, giving him a sizable financial advantage over the Democratic challenger and handing him victory. And he did it without the help of the Jim Crow-style voter ID bill he signed into law.


In the Wisconsin recall election, and countless elections throughout the country, both state and national, these low information voters vote against their economic interests and derail the democratic system. A democracy works only with an educated, informed populace, which the United States lacks and desperately needs if it will have any chance of overcoming its dysfunction.


White working class voters have made a pact with the devil - in the case of Republican Party, this should be taken in a literal sense - and now they (and all of us) are paying for it. Convinced that government programs are welfare - translated to mean the blacks and Latinos are getting freebees they don’t deserve - they will oppose them if doing so will hurt blacks more than whites. It is the legacy of the Southern Strategy that has allowed conservatives to politically capitalize on white resentment of black progress. That resentment is summed up in a scene from the 1997 film, Rosewood, a film depicting the massacre of a prosperous black Florida town by a white lynch mob. The following is an exchange between two white men in the film:


Man #1: You know he’s [Sylvester] got a piano? A ni**er with a goddamn piano. I’ve been working all my life, I ain’t got a piano.
Man #2: You don’t know how to play one.
Man #1: That ain’t the point. Old man Cummer, up that house of his, he’s got a piano. That ni**er’s got one, and I don’t.


The Rosewood massacre of 1923, like the Tulsa race riot two years earlier, was precipitated by claims that a black man raped a white woman. But the racial tensions in these massacres and others reflected an underlying social and economic competition.

And the culture wars, including gun worship, abortion bans, homophobia and immigrant bashing, become substitutes for concrete policies of economic uplift and social progress.While some working-class and poor whites have been content with being one rung above people of color on the totem pole, still they have remained on a very low rung and out of luck. There is a reason why the U.S.does not have a vibrant labor movement. And there is a reason why America maintains the flimsiest social safety net and the worst economic inequality of the advanced nations. It is because white members of the 99 percent - or enough of them, at least - have acted not in their own interests, but in the interests of the 1 percent. It is oppression by remote control, and the oppressed are made to feel like winners even as they emerge empty handed.


Faced with hard times, people have clear choices. Either they join forces across racial and ethnic lines and fight their common adversary, or they double down on the dumbness, thrive on misinformation and assign scapegoats. The Tea Party, which now prevails in national politics and owns a major political party, represents the latter of the two choices. It is this mindset that gives us creeps running state houses throughout the country - not just in Wisconsin. For example, the governor of Michigan is dismantling and disenfranchising majority-black cities, while the governor of Florida, the largest Medicare fraudster of all time in his old job, ispurging 182,000 Latino and black voters from the rolls.


And yet, once again, someone out there is voting for these people. Until we resolve this, America will never get any better.

The Limits of Tyrants Are Prescribed By the Endurance of Those Whom They Oppress

The Food Research and Action Center released a disturbing report about food hardship and hunger in the United States. According to the report, nearly one in five Americans simply does not have enough money to buy food that they and their family need. In 21 states, at least 20 percent of respondents said they did not have enough money to buy food in the past 12 months, while at least 15 percent of respondents in 45 states answered in the affirmative. No part of the country is untouched by this crisis.

And yet, Tea Party-sponsored governors and lawmakers around the country will make no mention of this, as they channel their inner tyrant and slash state budgets at the expense of the poor and working people. Megalomaniacs, they seem to derive pleasure from using their power to make people hurt -- certain people, that is. After all, their talk of fiscal responsibility is selective, as austerity is reserved for the poor. The rich are not being asked to tighten their belt, but rather are being rewarded with tax breaks. In that regard, Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker is doing exactly what his masters, the Koch brothers, instructed him to do. When America, backward and crumbling, should be investing in infrastructure and technology to create jobs and promote growth, some governors reject high-speed rail projects and wear their ignorance as a badge of honor.

Moreover, the concept of the budget crisis is being used as a subterfuge -- a scam, if you will -- to strip unions of their collective bargaining rights in states such as Wisconsin, Ohio and Indiana. And all the better for the extreme right if they can slip something devious like anti-gay language in the legislation when no one is looking. Because that's what tricksters do.

Unions have lost ground over the years, and not surprisingly, so too have working people, in terms of declining wages and a lower standard of living. New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie and others would make public unions the new welfare queens, the new bogeyman. And we are supposed to believe that public school teachers are the new millionaires, getting rich at the public's expense and breaking the backs of state budgets with their exorbitant salaries -- if you consider $40,000 or $60,000 a lot, that is. And when nobody is looking, the true millionaires and billionaires are making out like true bandits, taking away most of the nation's wealth.

But people are starting to wake up, which is why they are engaging in nonviolent protest by the thousands in Madison and elsewhere in America. They have much in common with protestors in Tripoli, Cairo and other nations in the Mideast, where the masses are divesting themselves of the mob bosses, potentates and presidents-for-life that have passed for leadership in that part of the world. All they want is to be able to put food on the table, to feed their children. But they are unable to do so.

Like Egypt's Mubarak and Qaddafi, America's Tea Party rulers -- kleptocrats who feign populist tendencies -- are driven by delusions of grandeur and utter contempt for the will of the masses. When the people do not go along with the program, these authoritarian leaders maintain power by brute force, arrests or through the barrel of a gun -- or at least consider it is an option. The primary difference is that the Mideast rulers operate under no pretense of democracy. Politics in the U.S. enjoys at least a democratic veneer. And in a technical sense the electorate, however uninformed and prone to act in their own economic interests, actually cast their ballots for such walking disasters as Gov. Rick Scott of Florida, John Kasich of Ohio, and Walker of Wisconsin. But thanks to the U.S. Supreme Court's Citizens United decision, corporations and wealthy interests have unlimited influence over elections. America really is owned by a handful of individuals, and the electoral system has turned into a tool to do the bidding of the oligarchs. So what is the real difference between an autocrat who holds no elections, or holds a sham election and declares victory, and a plutocrat who purchases an election with cash and utilizes corporate cronies to rule by proxy?

When the poor and working poor cannot afford to feed their families, all bets are off. Faced with rising inequality, oppressive laws and the naked greed of the powerful, people take to the streets. Here in the land of opportunity, wealthy conservative interests are jonesing to destroy the unions, the only thing standing between them and unlimited political and economic power. Who wins depends on how far the common folks are able and willing to take it.

Perhaps Frederick Douglass said it best: "Find out just what any people will quietly submit to and you have found out the exact measure of injustice and wrong which will be imposed upon them, and these will continue till they are resisted with either words or blows, or with both. The limits of tyrants are prescribed by the endurance of those whom they oppress."