Don’t Fall For the Old Divide And Conquer Trick

Washington’s Blog
Thursday, April 16, 2009

The powers-that-be are trying to distract us from the looting of our wallets by the big banks by creating a left-versus-right, us-versus-them drama.

You know, the old divide-and-conquer schtick.

Americans from across the political spectrum are furious at the financial elite who have robbed us blind, and their enablers in government.

While at the moment, conservatives are getting more press, those on the left are just as angry. For example, leading progressive Glenn Greenwald wrote an essay entitled “The virtues of public anger and the need for more” cheering the fact that Americans are starting to get in touch with their righteous anger at being ripped off.

Liberals have launched their own version of the tea party protests calling for the big banks to be broken up.

And many leading economists and policy experts have thunderously railed against Obama’s continuation of Bush’s cover-up-the-truth, too-big-to-fail, stick-it-to-the-taxpayers approach to the economic crisis.

On the conservative side of the aisle, Ron Paul’s media coordinator said that the mainstream Republican party has tried to hijack the tea party movement and has “co-opted” its message. He warns against letting the movement be diverted:

It’s important the people at the grassroots level stick to our guns and say no when they try to co-opt our message….

Bringing in someone like Gingrich takes away from the message. Newt Gingrich enabled George W. Bush, he enabled the big spending…

And as Michael Rivero has written:

Beware this “left wing versus right wing” dichotomy. This is an attempt to trick us into arguing with each other instead of uniting against the common cause of our problems…

The only real divide is the one mentioned at the very top of this article. The one percent that owns it all against the 99% of us being driven into poverty. The poor against the oligarchs.

To my friends on both the left and the right, I urge you to remember that folks on the other side of the aisle are not the problem. As honest people on both the left and the right agree, the real problems are:

• Lack of honest disclosure about the shenanigans of the financial giants

• Failing to prosecute the criminal actions of those companies and their big wigs

• Failing to break up zombie insolvent companies

• Slipping trillions of dollars into the hands of the richest and most powerful companies under the table

• Gaming the numbers

• And continuing to pursue failed economic policies even after they’ve been proven counterproductive

If we fall for the divide and conquer strategy, where idiots on both sides try to focus our anger on the “other team” instead of the real culprits, we will get distracted, lose direction, and thus became easy to ignore and control. Then the powers-that-be will be able to continue pickpocketing us for years to come.

See this and this.