The Russian Model

In an interview, Matt Taibbi suggested that this country is heading down the path that the Russians have blazed:

You were in Russia for several years working for The Exile. Are we beginning to resemble the Russian class system? The wealthy oligarchs who rule everyone yet no one does anything about it?

I think there’s an argument to be made that we’re heading in that direction. That’s certainly not an idea that’s original to me.

It’s just more apparent now.

Sure, sure. There’s a guy at MIT, Simon Johnson, who used to be an IMF executive. He worked with developing third world economies and dealt with the whole issue of third world corruption for a long time. He wrote—from personal experience—about what he saw then and what he sees now with the financial services industry, and he basically says that we’re going down the same path. He sees a lot of the same things happening, such as the co-opting of the mainstream media and the corporate regulatory capture where you have former financial services industry employees running the regulatory agencies. I don’t think it’s on the same scale, but there are characteristics of it for sure.

...

I think people are going to realize what a blip on the radar American-style democracy in the 20th century was. A big middle class that had a huge power base, financial interests, bosses giving benefits… all those things. It’s just a little blip in history. For the most part, concentrated wealth will make all the decisions and everybody else is dictated to. It’s going to be like that to varying degrees. The more corrupt it is the more it’s heading in that direction, and clearly a place like Russia is a very corrupt place.

That's our future, folks. The middle-class Teabaggers have bought into the entire"get government off the backs of the corporations and the rich" that the greedy corrupt bastards like the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and the Koch Brothers have been handing out.

They have bought into the coded racism of the GOP, though that's nothing new. They have lapped that shit up ever since Ronald Reagan was blabbering about "welfare queens" through Palin's line to all-white audiences of "you're the real Americans" to Gingrich's racist "food stamp president" crack.

It's not hard to figure out who the real villains are. They're the ones who have systematically enriched themselves by both looting the national treasury and ripping off the middle and working classes. They've made out like bandits for the last thirty years and, now that the bills are coming due, the Republican way to pay the bills is to screw down even harder on the middle and working classes, to break them economically.

The sheer evil of the Republican party and the arrogant ignorance of the Teabaggers is a wonder to behold.