By Henry McRandall
WRISEUP.COM
There is a great irony in two new major factoids revealed in the past few days and that irony should be a source of bemusement for most thinking Americans.
The first item was the revelation that, accroding to the latest U.S. Census, almost one in two Americans qualifies as either poor or low-income – in the richest country in the world.
And the second item is the revelation that a new poll shows that 43 percent of Amerikkkans are not aware of any income gap between the rich and the poor.
How can anyone live in today’s Amerikkka and not be aware of the enormous gap between the rich and the rest that is threatening to swallow the country whole?
The answer lies in where they live and where they get their news.
The Top One Percent, of course, mostly live in gated communities, safe from the prying eyes of the less fortunate and also safe from the door-to-door canvassers for charities trying to keep the poor from dying of starvation.
To them, of course, everything is peachy-keen in Amerikkka and, as disgraced former Republican Tea Party presidential candidate Herman Cain opined, “anyone in Amerikkka who doesn’t have a job today, it’s because they just don’t want to work.”
But the rest of the 43 percent of Amerikkkans who can’t see the gap between the rich and the rest are part – almost half – of The Other 99 Percent – the poor, the working class and the middle class.
How can they possibly not see that immoral and unconscionable chasm? Very simply put, they have been conditioned not to see.
This blind-as-a-bat 42 percent are the people who get most of their “news” from Faux News, the right-wing radio talk-show buffoons and an assortement of semi-literate preachers-in-the-pulpit from so-called kkkonservative KKKristian churches.
It’s not surprising that a recent study found that the average person who gets their “news” primarily from those sources is less well-informed than people who don’t read, watch or listen to any news at all.
Clearly, in a society where the KKKrist of the kkkonservatives is just another kkkorporate kkkapitalist, the role of the mass media and the electronic evangelists is to misinform and disinform the flock.
How better to keep the victims – the prey – the Other 99 Percent – forever turning the other cheek so that the Top One Percent – the predators – the perps – the banksters and the kkkorporate robber barons – can slap it too?