Dog Whistles...

There was once a brilliant man named Lee Atwater. May he rest in peace. Atwater was a political strategists who is most famous for getting George H.W. Bush elected with one of the most reprehensible campaign ads in American history.  In the 1988 election then Vice President H.W. Bush was running against Massachusetts Governor Michael Dukakis. Dukakis' predecessor initiated a prison furlough program which allowed certain inmates to visit their families for a weekend with good behavior. During he first month of Dukakis' term as Governor a felon named Willie Horton who while out of a furlough raped a Massachusetts woman.  Atwater immediately made a campaign commercial showing a prison with a revolving door and a second simply showing a photo of inmate Horton.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wTdUQ9SYhUw

 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Io9KMSSEZ0Y

The Ad showing Horton was said by many at the time to have been a racial dog whistle given that studies showed that many rural voters associated crime with people of color. Atwater admitted as much. He once said:

"You start out in 1954 by saying, "Nigger, nigger, nigger." By 1968 you can't say "nigger" — that hurts you. Backfires. So you say stuff like forced busing, states' rights and all that stuff. You're getting so abstract now [that] you're talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you're talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is [that] blacks get hurt worse than whites. And subconsciously maybe that is part of it. I'm not saying that. But I'm saying that if it is getting that abstract, and that coded, that we are doing away with the racial problem one way or the other. You follow me — because obviously sitting around saying, "We want to cut this," is much more abstract than even the busing thing, and a hell of a lot more abstract than "Nigger, nigger."


He also joked in the early 90s that his biggest accomplishment was convincing that a Connecticut born blue blood was just a "regular guy" from Texas and even said that his job was to get people vote against their own interests.
               My issue here isn't racism in America, but rather our VILE political landscape and how the unintelligent are manipulated and seem oblivious to it. In the  1980s Ronald Reagan introduced something called "trickle down economics".  The logic behind "trickle down" was that when the rich get richer it helps the economy because they SPEND more money.
            Most economists have shown that when the rich get richer they simply save more or buy stocks and bonds. They don't really do much for the average steel worker or farmer but the popular spin always seems to be that when big companies get more money or have fewer regulations to deal with they give raises. This has proven to be false as American wages have frozen since the Reagan administration. By that I mean they have NOT kept up with either the cost of living or inflation.

       When huge corporations have most recently gotten huge tax breaks, rather than hiring more people they FIRED people and bought their own stocks to manipulate the prices. Amazingly whenever someone mentions raising the minimum wage, certain politicians fight it saying it would crash the economy and have convinced their followers of it, and the same politicians have convinced their followers that the SAME wealthy men and women who control Wall Street will simply make them richer rather than giving top executives bonuses.

      I'm no expert on the economy, but I've always thought that the purpose of any company was to make money.  Companies hire people because they need jobs done, NOT because their purpose was to "create jobs". How many companies have moved jobs to other countries OR simply replaced people with robots because it meant more money? This wasn't done because regulations or high taxes forced them to do so. Huge companies are not known for their "compassion" their sole goal is to make as much of money as possible. Recent relaxation of regulations and a huge tax break are being sold as a boon for the economy. I don't see it, but then again the under educated do sadly tend to respond to dog whistles.