Lou Dobbs IMMIGRATION, ECONOMY, WAR, RACE

He speaks for the “declining middle class” -- that’s all of us from the well-off to the low income, who have seen our health care and education, fuel and food costs rise and our wages decline. He is a White reporter who embraces Black correspondents and policy makers of diverse political stripes. He’s anti-war, anti-free trade, anti-corporate, anti-government corruption.

And most of all, he’s anti-immigrant.

Anti- “illegal” immigrant, anti-“alien”, anti-non-English speaking, anti-“people who sneak cross our southern border”. Furthermore, he wants you to know we are in a CRISIS. The “illegal aliens” penetrating our Southern border are the lynch pin. They are at the core of everything else that ails us. The message is implicit. The “alien” who comes in after hours, who works behind the kitchen door, the one who packages the meat and picks the potatoes for pennies on the dollar; they are the ones to blame for war, corporatism, corruption.

This is a fascist message, clear and simple. It focuses on real issues facing a broad sector of society, unites people who were previously divided and provides them all with a close but alien scapegoat. The previously upper-middle class, join the poor in the “declining middle”; Black and White, now all “Americans”. All of us fed up with this criminal war, disgusted with corrupt politicians and the corporations that support them, are susceptible to his message.

I am searching for a metaphor. Is it like the doctor who convinces you that you are addicted to nicotine and prescribes heroine to kick the habit? The long distance runner who sees they are falling behind and so decides to run back to the starting line with all deliberate speed? Is he showing hungry dogs how their masters gorge and then skinning and dangling the pup that eats the least, in front of the hungry canines? Anyway you look at it the American people are desperate for a cure, they want to win at something, they are hungry. They are willing to attack the weakest link that holds their coalition together. They are ready to take decisive action, even if the action they take moves them precisely in the wrong direction. Lou Dobbs knows this.

One of the first political awakening moments for me was when I was nine years old and sitting on the porch swing next door, in North Carolina in 1967, hearing my southern white neighbors talk about how Wallace was the man for the little guy. I knew that in our house the man was a racist. So how could he provide hope for the little guy next door?

Around the same time I started to talk to my dad about Hitler, and how he was able to convince the German people that the Jews among them were the cause of their very real social and economic ills. My dad was born a Jew in Germany the same year Hitler came to power. I thought he ought to know. But he didn’t, and I’m still trying to figure it out.

I still don’t know. Lou Dobbs of CNN does, and he has the microphone. I just have this blog that no one reads.