Feature: Doorways

Naomi Klein gets it.....she understands the message of deception by the wizard behind the curtain...
This is a great article...it opens our eyes just a crack...to the reality behind the rhetoric....
worth the time to read the article in full @
http://www.truthout.org/docs_2006/020408H.shtml

Disowned by the Ownership Society
By Naomi Klein
The Nation

18 February 2008 Issue

"Remember the "ownership society," fixture of major George W. Bush addresses for the first four years of his presidency? "We're creating...an ownership society in this country, where more Americans than ever will be able to open up their door where they live and say, welcome to my house, welcome to my piece of property," Bush said in October 2004. Washington think-tanker Grover Norquist predicted that the ownership society would be Bush's greatest legacy, remembered "long after people can no longer pronounce or spell Fallujah." Yet in Bush's final State of the Union address, the once-ubiquitous phrase was conspicuously absent. And little wonder: rather than its proud father, Bush has turned out to be the ownership society's undertaker.

Well before the ownership society had a neat label, its creation was central to the success of the right-wing economic revolution around the world. The idea was simple: if working-class people owned a small piece of the market-a home mortgage, a stock portfolio, a private pension-they would cease to identify as workers and start to see themselves as owners, with the same interests as their bosses. That meant they could vote for politicians promising to improve stock performance rather than job conditions. Class consciousness would be a relic.

It was always tempting to dismiss the ownership society as an empty slogan-"hokum" as former Labor Secretary Robert Reich put it. But the ownership society was quite real. It was the answer to a roadblock long faced by politicians favoring policies to benefit the wealthy. The problem boiled down to this: people tend to vote their economic interests. Even in the wealthy United States, most people earn less than the average income. That means it is in the interest of the majority to vote for politicians promising to redistribute wealth from the top down."

read the rest: http://www.truthout.org/docs_2006/020408H.shtml