Why the "Crash of 2016" Is But a Thom Hartman Pipe Dream

First Let's Do a Profile of "Red-neck America"

Who are the white supremacists? There has been no formal survey, for obvious reasons, but there are several noticeable patterns. Geographically, they come from America’s heartland—small towns, rural cities, swelling suburban sprawl outside larger Sunbelt cities. These aren’t the prosperous towns, but the single-story working-class exurbs that stretch for what feels like forever in the corridor between Long Beach and San Diego (not the San Fernando Valley), or along the southern tier of Pennsylvania, or spread all through the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, across the vast high plains of eastern Washington and Oregon, through Idaho and Montana. There are plenty in the declining cities of the Rust Belt, in Dearborn and Flint, Buffalo and Milwaukee, in the bars that remain in the shadows of the hulking deserted factories that once were America’s manufacturing centers. And that doesn’t even touch the former states of the Confederacy, where flying the Confederate flag is a culturally approved symbol of “southern pride”—in the same way that wearing a swastika would be a symbol of German “heritage” (except it’s illegal in Germany to wear a swastika).

There’s a large rural component. Although “the spread of far-right groups over the last decade has not been limited to rural areas alone,” writes Osha Gray Davidson, “the social and economic unraveling of rural communities—especially in the Midwest—has provided far-right groups with new audiences for their messages of hate. Some of these groups have enjoyed considerable success in their rural campaign.” For many farmers facing foreclosures, the Far Right promises to help them save their land have been appealing, offering farmers various schemes and legal maneuvers to help prevent foreclosures, blaming the farmers’ troubles on Jewish bankers and the one-world government. “As rural communities started to collapse,” Davidson writes, the Far Right “could be seen at farm auctions comforting families . . . confirming what rural people knew to be true: that their livelihoods, their families, their communities—their very lives—were falling apart.” In stark contrast to the government indifference encountered by rural Americans, a range of Far Right groups, most recently the militias, have seemingly provided support, community, and answers.  In that sense, the contemporary militias and other white supremacist groups are following in the footsteps of the Ku Klux Klan, the Posse Comitatus, and other Far Right patriot groups who recruited members in rural America throughout the 1980s. They tap into a long history of racial and ethnic paranoia in rural America, as well as an equally long tradition of collective local action and vigilante justice. There remains a widespread notion that “Jews, African-Americans, and other minority-group members ‘do not entirely belong,’” which may, in part, “be responsible for rural people’s easy acceptance of the far right’s agenda of hate,” writes Matthew Snipp. “The far right didn’t create bigotry in the Midwest; it didn’t need to,” Davidson concludes. “It merely had to tap into the existing undercurrent of prejudice once this had been inflamed by widespread economic failure and social discontent.”

And many have moved from their de-industrializing cities, foreclosed suburban tracts, and wasted farmlands to smaller rural areas because they seek the companionship of like-minded fellows, in relatively remote areas far from large numbers of nonwhites and Jews and where they can organize, train, and build protective fortresses. Many groups have established refuge in rural communities, where they can practice military tactics, stockpile food and weapons, hone their survivalist skills, and become self-sufficient in preparation for Armageddon, the final race war, or whatever cataclysm they envision. Think of it as the twenty-first-century version of postwar suburban “white flight”—but on steroids.

They’re certainly Christian, but not just any Christian—they’re evangelical Protestant, Pentacostalist, and members of radical sects that preach racial purity as the Word of Jesus. (Catholicism is certainly stocked with conservatives on social issues, but white supremacists tap into such a long and ignoble tradition of anti-Catholicism that they tend to have their own right-wing organizations, mostly fighting against women’s rights and gay rights.) Some belong to churches like the Christian Identity Church, which gained a foothold on the Far Right in the early 1980s. Christian Identity’s focus on racism and anti-Semitism provides the theological underpinnings to the shift from a more “traditional agrarian protest” to paramilitarism. It is from the Christian Identity movement that the Far Right gets its theological claims that Adam is the ancestor of the Caucasian race, whereas non-whites are pre-Adamic “mud people,” without souls, and Jews are the children of Satan. According to this doctrine, Jesus was not Jewish and not from the Middle East; actually, he was northern European, his Second Coming is close at hand, and followers can hasten the apocalypse. It is the birthright of Anglo-Saxons to establish God’s kingdom on earth; America’s and Britain’s “birthright is to be the wealthiest, most powerful nations on earth . . . able, by divine right, to dominate and colonize the world.”

This hatred of Blacks and the poor is reflected sometimes in the most "innocent looking of vessles.  Sarah Palin has a real racket going about this "Who me?  Plain Jane housewife - thing about her.   She's the furthest thing from that.  Nothing from the tea party right is as it seems.  Sarah Palin was making a speech about how "All these free things Blacks and the poor get- - are going to have to be paid for by yours and my children.  Because China is going to come along (another oft repeated Pipe Dream of the tea party) one day to collect the bill and we won't be able to pay it.  It will just be like Obama was putting America back in Slavery.  This British news commentator took indignent exception to her "Slavery" remark and began reading from this one white slave master's journal from the 1700s and there were incidents about flogging slaves to within an inch of their lives and one slave being forced urinate into the mouth of another slave".  And the comentator said something like "Perhaps it would be justice is Sarah Palin got to know what slavery was really like for a while".  (Selah)

While Tom Hartman’s prediction of “The Stock Market Crash of 2016” is intriguing, it plays right into the hands of far right nuts like Judy and Glen Beck, who have maintained all along that the whole purpose of Obama’s economic policy is “to crash the economy big time, so that the American people rise up and demand a radical change in the way our government does business”.  While I think that wouldn’t be a bad idea myself- - - and at some point we are as a nation going to make radical (meaning “root”) economic changes - - - I guess this scenario is such a “pipe dream” in its own sense, it will never happen.  “They” won’t allow it to happen.   Right now the stock market is making new all time highs breaking 16,000 on the Dow Jones Industrials on an intra-day basis,   Personally I wouldn’t make another move economically without knowing what “signals” are saying are the right ones.   Astrologically I’m predicting a major bear market for the rest of this year and at LEAST the first half of 2014 and perhaps longer than that.   But there are statistics weighing heavily against a stock crash in 2016.  For one if you go back and check out years ending in either five or six and you go back sixty years- - you will see that in every single mid-decade period, we have been in the middle of a bull market.    We all know that stock plunges are often due to a loss of capital investment support- - and these people of the Romney wing of the Republican party have such obscene amounts of resurve, “old money” inherited funds, that I don’t think they’ll ever run out of it.  Hartman has been pressing this “Eighty year purge” theory for the past ten years.  We’re still waiting.   Hartman believes that after such a crash, social and economic reforms are often put into place.   This would be simply grand.   But I don’t see how the Tea Party can ever be made to lose its grip on either the economy or the news media in general.  They have gained the power they have for so long sought, and they know it, and they aren’t going to just relinquish it.

 I listened to the rest of Randy Rhodes and then read the essay Randy had on her site this morning from yesterday “Angry, White, Rural America”.   It’s good for “deep background” but there is an area or two I take issue with it.  But before I do - you need to remember that this Organized Reactionary Hate movement has been incubating in America for a long time.  It was only the Pipe Dream of Justice Powell that some sort of "right wing media oracle would appear, so that we could controle the political discourse.  And now they do indeed control the political discourse embracing the most erratic of nut cases as poster boys.  Just today they released the George Zimmerman 911 tape as kind of a "tweet to the media", which is how Zimmerman sees his 911 calls.  Zimmerman does absolutely everything for show and is intoxicated with his own stardom.  Zimmerman falsely stated the altercation came about when his girlfriend was pregnent and Zimmy said he was leaving and she threw a fit and began smashing her own furniture and then left the house leaving Zimmy there.  This 911 call is strictly right out of the Twilight Zone since it comes out the girlfriend was not even pregnent.  He just made that up.   

One might almost feel sorry for all those ignorant hay seeds on "America's Heartland" but they aren't nearly as either "poor' or "neglected" as they would have you to believe.  For instance nobody in their right mind would say that the Tea Party is anti-corporate.   In terms of all the other demographics, I see no reason why liberals shouldn’t be able to turn those things around and use them to our advantage.   Franklin Roosevelt in 1936 had the cajones to make a speech against the corporate "Economic Royalists".  He was able to do it.  He had the media on his side.   I mentioned in Dr. Levy's class the other day that President Obama just lacks that certain "etherial quality" that makes people want to listen to you.  In other words, President Obama has no "Gravitas".   There may be a bright spot however to all this recent taring down of President Obama.  If Democrats cam edge him "out of the picture" than for the first time since early 2007 we can finally put together a winning Progressive agenda that will attract spirited support and not just grudging lip service, which is all President Obama has gotten, or will ever get.  Because basically President Obama is not a Progressive at heart.  He's a man whose life goals was NOT to change America for the better but just to BE elected President.  So President Obama "has his reward" as Jesus Christ might say.  The problem driving Obama's poll numbers is - -The Rest Of Us - - Don't. 

It was Randy Rhodes and then the soap opera.  Here again I don’t like the whole tone of this shakedown or- - intervention or whatever it is.  It’s the way they all stare at her in a line - - stone faced saying nothing, waiting for her to say one thing wrong.  For all the list of her offences- - almost none of these was brought up.  It was like a row of judges in black robes wearing masks or something- - like a creepy movie.   And Jennifer’s make up and hair style were so different I didn’t recognize her at first.  But she's not entirely powerless at this point.  All she has to do is remember that Jennifer's beloved son was in the room with her when she overdosed.  She could use Jack Junior as some sort of "bargaining chip" if things got desperate.  But if she really wanted to come clean - - I'd say "I'll pardon you but there is one sin I'm waiting to hear confessed out of your mouth.  When I hear that I'll set you at liberty".  The sin I personally would like to see real contrition about was her planting that dope on Vargis and sending him back to prison.  Then you have Sonny making an asshole out of himself calling Gabriel a “selfish bitch”.   No, he’s the “selfish” one - - if he thinks her baby is his business.  And Sonny and Will are also each other’s “bitch”, which is something a custody judge would take into consider-ation when it came to determining custody, should it come to that.  Personally if I were Gabriel I would have said to Justin "OK, fine I won't come to you.  But the next lawyer I go to might fight dirtier on my behalf than you would do anyhow.   But make no mistake about it.  A judge who heard my story is going to say to me "OK, I see.  You might want to marry the father but he's a faggot so you can't.  You want someone who loves you the way you need to be loved, and reminds you that you're a real woman."  Needless to say Will and company better pray Gabriel doesn’t bring up before said judge the whole abortion chapter, because the judge will wonder why she’s not with Nick, who talked her OUT of having the abortion, rather than Will- - who doesn't know his ass from a hole in the ground to begin with - was all for “sweeping it away”.