Money buys racism (and other forms of hate)
There are a dozen versions of the little fable about the three people sitting at a table with a dozen cookies. One person has nine cookies, one has two, and one person has one cookie. The two people with three cookies between them start giving the side-eye to the person with nine cookies, when that person leans over to the person with two cookies and whispers "That person with one cookie wants YOUR cookies."
In some versions the person with one cookie is black, in some they're an immigrant, etc.
Racism goes back long before 1492 and it's certainly not exclusive to this slice of North America. Our efforts to acknowledge it, identify the damage, and undo racism are painfully small and slow - but up through 2008 they were steady. Progress was made, in excruciatingly tiny increments, but it was progress.
I knew when Obama was elected that it would provoke some backlash - but I also felt proud of America in a whole new way. It was a watershed moment. There was the usual stupid racist bullshit, but it wasn't until two years later that the Hate Machine got turbocharged.
What happened in 2010?
"Citizens United". Money stopped being a complex, somewhat problematic economic concept and became "speech." And in the land of "free speech", making money "speech" was the ultimate way of SILENCING the not-rich.
Granted, it was Reagan who started undoing America's progress toward a more equitable society, deregulating banks and communications, destroying the tools government was using to address inequity, idolizing wealth and consumption and defining 'success' as making a fuckton of money no matter what you had to destroy or degrade to do it.
But until 2010 it was still possible, if increasingly difficult, to use the electoral process to curb the worst excesses. Which really pissed off the people with nine cookies, who all thought they were entitled to the whole dozen. Crumbs are plenty for the rest of us. So if we keep voting for people who won't let them grab all the cookies, we have to be stopped.
"Citizens United" made it possible for them to do exactly that. Not just buying elections, but buying communications outlets, buying "think tanks", buying the commons, buying the conversation and controlling it for themselves. And as long as they can keep the other two people fighting over that last cookie, they can get on with sliding the cookies off everyone else's plate.
In 2010, the Supreme Court basically told us "Enjoy fighting over your crumbs, you dumb suckers."
The hate spewed unchecked. Racism. Anti-semitism. Misogyny. Xenophobia. Any kind of hate that can be used to keep us dumb suckers suspicious and mistrustful of one another, while they grift everything out from under us.
And it's working.
wearily,
Bright
P.S. I'm NOT saying we shouldn't continue to fight hate in all its forms. We can do that as well. But until we undo the Great Grift, we'll be trying to move the desert one grain of sand at a time.
= new reply since forum marked as read
my proof is I was born and raised in the USA and have never seen anyone so orange in my life. 
It's a loser's strategy to try to disqualify competitors based on race. As if it isn't stupidly easy to prove one's birthplace, citizenship, documents, etc. These idiots are actually worried they can't make it on merit alone if they have qualified competitors. Trump could not have defeated Obama so he needed to pull out all the stops with foreign election interference and blatant sexism to beat Hillary. And he's the one with 92 indictments. Hillary has never been indicted. He's such an A-hole that he convinced millions of stupid women to vote for an unqualified buffoon over a qualified white woman.
It's why idiots want to keep US born US raised US citizens like me out of security clearance jobs in the US government. It has jack shit to do with security. They want to protect their good old boys club and throw some crumbs to a few white women and black people while stepping on the throats of brown Americans.
